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CICERO IN MAINE 

And Other Essays 



CICERO IN MAINE 

And Other Essays 



BY 



MARTHA BAKER DUNN 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1905 



UBRARY of CONGRESSI 

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COPYRIGHT I9O5 BY MARTHA BAKER DUNN 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published September jqoj 



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CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I. Cicero in Maine i 

II. A Plea for the Shiftless Reader . . 29 

III. The Meditations of an Ex-School-Commit- 

tee Woman 53 

IV. Piazza Philosophy . . . . 87 
V. The Browning Tonic . . . .121 

VI. The Book and the Place . . . 153 
VII. Concerning Temperance and Judgment to 

come ....... 191 

VIII. Book-Dusting Time . . . . 223 

IX. Education 251 



CICERO IN MAINE 



CICERO IN MAINE 

WHEN I was a girl attending the high 
school, — a when that opens the gate- 
way into a magic land of youth, — we were 
fortunate enough to have a teacher who was, 
as I heard a college youth phrase it the other 
day, " dead stuck on Latin." It was not sim- 
ply that this gifted man had a passion for Latin 
literature, but he was, or seemed so to our 
youthful imaginations, besotted with the gram- 
mar of the language. No degree of profi- 
ciency or distinction to which we could attain 
in the matter of fluent translations was ever 
allowed to excuse us from the daily collection 
of gems of knowledge from Andrews and 
Stoddard's Latin Grammar. 

The class of which I was a member was a 
small but unique aggregation. Our teacher 
had high hopes of classical triumphs for us 
because, though our intellectual gifts might 
not be of surpassing lustre, our critical fac- 



4 CICERO IN MAINE 

ulties were abnormally developed. The heroic 
degree of discipline which enabled the im- 
mortal Light Brigade to feel that it was 

Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 

would have found no favor in our ranks. The 
most uncouth lad in the class, the least hope- 
ful of success in polite literary attainments, 
was the very one, it seems to me now, who 
oftenest voiced our united conclusions most 
clearly. 

" If we ain't to ask questions, and ain't to 
say what we think, what are we goin' to do? " 
he queried ; and one and all felt that to such 
a question there could be but one reply : we 
were to ask questions, we were to say what 
we thought, — for what else were we in school ? 

To this method of pursuing our researches 
our teacher had no objection provided we 
kept within reasonable bounds, and he had 
his own way of setting the limits. 

" Ain't we ever goin' to git through studyin' 
grammar ? " inquired the aforementioned awk- 
ward lad, after months of hope deferred. 

" If Mr. Brown thinks he has learned all 



CICERO IN MAINE 5 

the grammar has to impart, perhaps he will 
kindly give us a little information about its 
contents," the teacher suggested blandly ; and 
then followed a terrible ten minutes for Mr. 
Brown, during which every vestige of his fan- 
cied familiarity with Andrews and Stoddard 
fled from his grasp. 

The victim sat down at last baffled, per- 
spiring, but by no means entirely vanquished ; 
no sooner was he seated than his hand began 
to wave frantically aloft, signaling the fact 
that he had yet a Parthian arrow to dispatch. 

" Obstupui, steteruntque comae, et vox f aucibus haesit," 

he quoted in a quavering voice from yester- 
day's lesson, while we looked at him open- 
mouthed at such erudition. " When I 'm all 
badgered up so, I know a good deal more 'n 
I 'pear to be able to tell." 

"It would seem so, Mr. Brown, it would 
seem so," the teacher assented with a dark- 
ling glance which warned the rest of us of 
sorrow to come, " and therein you differ from 
some of your classmates, who are often able to 
tell more than they can know." 



6 CICERO IN MAINE 

It was owing to this lively, though shallow, 
intelligence of ours, and the facility with 
which we engrafted pagan Rome on Puritan 
New England, that our instructor was en- 
couraged to jump us from Caesar to Virgil 
with no intervening stages. To him, as to 
Mr. Cooper, the commentator whose notes 
assisted our studies, the reading of Virgil was 
a joy of which one could not partake too soon 
or too copiously. He expected us to become 
rapturously interested in the progress of the 
story, to enjoy with him the favorite passages 
which he rolled out sonorously for our bene- 
fit ; mouth-filling lines like 

Exoritur clamorque virum clangorque tubarum, 

or the softer modulations of 

Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. 

Alas, how grievously we disappointed the 
good man's hopes ! Virgil's poetic genius ap- 
pealed to us little more than Milton's Paradise 
Lost would appeal to a primer class suddenly 
plunged into its mysteries. Even when we 
translated most glibly we were like creatures 

Moving about in worlds not realised. 



CICERO IN MAINE 7 

The virtues of the pious JEneas were of a 
variety not mentioned in our Sunday-school 
lessons ; we held his seamanship very cheap ; 
we had reasons of our own for doubting the 
authenticity of the whole Trojan legend. 

" How did they ever git to Troy ? " our class 
orator inquired dubiously. " There wan't one 
in the whole lot 't knew any more 'bout navi- 
gation 'n a fly in a pan o' milk ! " This was 
after we had learned from Mr. Cooper's pre- 
face to Book I that our friend -#Lneas had 
already been roaming the seas for seven years 
before presenting himself for the pleasure of 
our acquaintance. 

From the first we had no use for Dido. 
Love was an emotion which had been men- 
tioned in our hearing, and there were boys 
and girls among our number who " went to- 
gether," and displayed varying degrees of 
what we called " softness " in so doing ; but 
that any human creature could be soft enough 
deliberately to toast herself upon a funeral pile, 
simply because another human creature sailed 
away and left her, was beyond our wildest con- 
ception of the tender passion. 



8 CICERO IN MAINE 

The uncouth lad, who frequently wrote 
notes for general circulation among the girls 
of the class, issued the following as soon as 
Dido's funereal intentions were announced : — 

" Pass this On, 
" Dido was a Fool ; how 'd she know but 
Eneeus would be Blowed back by the first 
Wind ? " 

Some of the boys who were studying Greek 
originated a sort of class chant, and the school- 
room for a time resounded during play hours 
with the ringing notes of 

Dido, Dido, died ou' doors ! 

As a result of such callousness to all the 
tender and lofty emotions, we were at last 
transferred to Cicero, and here, for the first 
time, we touched solid ground. We lived in 
an age when treason and traitors were mat- 
ters of recent history, and philippics were 
something we were very familiar with, albeit 
under a different name. 

The class lyric, by an easy transition, blos- 
somed into 



CICERO IN MAINE 9 

We '11 hang old Cat'line to a sour apple tree, 
and without a dissenting voice we took the 
great orator to our homes and hearts. 

The teacher, when he discerned our enthu- 
siasm, and heard the uncouth lad vociferating 
genially, " He 's jest givin' it to the old Cat 
to-day, ain't he ? " heaved a sigh, perhaps, over 
the incomprehensible vagaries of pupils, and 
wisely addressed himself to making the most 
of the situation. 

One Saturday forenoon he brought Rufus 
Choate's " Eloquence of Revolutionary Peri- 
ods," and read us what a great American ora- 
tor had to say about the genius of Cicero. 
Splendid words they were, these vibrating 
sentences of Choate's, and as we listened our 
eyes shone and our hearts beat : — 

" From that purer eloquence, from that 
nobler orator, the great trial of fire and blood 
through which the spirit of Rome was pass- 
ing had burned and purged away all things 
light, all things gross ; the purple robe, the 
superb attitude and action, the splendid com- 
monplaces of a festal rhetoric, are all laid by ; 
the ungraceful, occasional vanity of adulation, 



io CICERO IN MAINE 

the elaborate speech of the abundant, happy 
mind at its ease, all disappear ; and instead, 
what directness, what plainness, what rapid- 
ity, what fire, what abnegation of himself, what 
disdain, what hate of the usurper and the 
usurpation, what grand, swelling sentiments, 
what fine raptures of liberty roll and revel 
there ! " 

On the next declamation day, as soon as 
the class orator mounted the platform, we 
realized by the light in his dark eyes that he 
had something new to offer us. There never 
was a more moving speaker than our class 
orator. No matter how many times he de- 
claimed Virginius, — and, owing to many 
pressing engagements which swallowed up 
his time for learning new " pieces," this hap- 
pened with tolerable frequency, — with that 
slow, deliberate, musical accent he captured 
his audience. At every repetition, 

Over the Alban mountains the light of morning broke, 

as if it were for us a new birth ; when, at the 
critical moment, 

Virginius caught the whittle up and hid it in his gown, 



CICERO IN MAINE n 

we greeted its disappearance with the same 
shuddering breath; and the " hoarse, changed 
voice " in which he spake, " Farewell, sweet 
child, farewell!" never lost its magic for tears. 

On this well-remembered day, however, 
the sorrows of Virginius were forgotten ; it 
was Rufus Choate's magnificent version of a 
representative passage of Cicero's oratory that 
fell upon our charmed ears, and we listened 
to the swelling tones of the speaker with that 
quickened, thrilling breath which marks the 
hearer who has Surrendered himself to the 
emotion of the moment. 

" Lay hold on this opportunity of our sal- 
vation, conscript fathers — by the immortal 
gods I conjure you ! — and remember that 
you are the foremost men here, in the council 
chamber of the whole earth. Give one sign 
to the Roman people that even now as they 
pledge their valor, so you pledge your wisdom 
to the crisis of the state," — thus the appeal 
opened. It was the ageless cry for liberty, 
the cry that is the same yesterday, to-day, 
and forever. 

" Born to glory and to liberty, let us hold 



12 CICERO IN MAINE 

these distinctions fast, or let us greatly die ! " 
— these are words that belong to every cen- 
tury and to every race of men. We did not 
know how to formulate what we felt, but it 
was a moment when Bull Run and Gettys- 
burg, that worn face of Abraham Lincoln, 
and all the unmarked graves on Southern 
battlefields confused themselves within us in 
some indefinable passion, and took hold on 
the heroic memories of ancient Rome, — a 
moment when, as in all the high impulses 
of life, the barriers of time and place were 
melted away. 

I believe, as I look back now, that our first 
conscious inspiration toward what was best 
in literature and noblest in statesmanship 
took root from that time. We were living in 
strenuous days of reconstruction after a great 
war, and the air was still full of battle echoes, 
but we drank in the influences of the hour as 
unheedingly as a plant drinks the sunshine 
and the dew ; it needed this breath from an- 
cient Rome to shape the cumulative forces 
within us into the beginnings of American 
citizenship. 



CICERO IN MAINE 13 

No healthy young creature realizes the pro- 
cess of his own growth, but many of us can 
vaguely remember the period when 

those first affections 
Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing, 

first reminded our bodies of the souls that 
dwelt mysteriously within. We received that 
reminder noisily or undemonstratively ac- 
cording to our varying temperaments, but in 
each one of us, none the less, life marked the 
hour when a new epoch began. 

The regular daily session of the school 
closed at half-past four in the afternoon, but 
from that time until five o'clock a dark -faced, 
sweet-voiced woman, with what seemed to 
us a marvelous twist to her tongue, gave in- 
struction in French to the ambitious few 
who aspired to a knowledge of that polished 
language. There was the girl who learned 
easily and forgot everything, the girl who 
learned ploddingly and forgot nothing, and 
another, still, who seems to me now the far- 



i 4 CICERO IN MAINE 

thest away of all, although there are buoyant 
hours when her once overflowing youth and 
bounding vitality return to her pulses like 
the resurrection of a lost joy. 

Of the three male members — for the class 
was a well-balanced one — the class orator 
and the uncouth lad constituted two, and the 
third was the genius of the school, the only 
scholar, perhaps, whose intuitions leaped un- 
erringly to the goal, who saw a subject whole, 
and wrested the inwardness from it while the 
rest of us were laboriously pondering its 
earliest developments. Just why the uncouth 
lad elected to study the French language I 
could not then comprehend, though I have 
often told myself that the mere recollection of 
his recitations added a distinct flavor to life. 

He himself accounted for his presence in 
the class by the statement that " as he took 
care o' the schoolhouse he might 's well be 
recitin' French as doin' nothin', seem' as he 'd 
got to stay anyway ; " and to behold the vital 
interest which he displayed in the sugar and 
spice of the grocer, or the mahogany table of 
the cabinet-maker, was only one degree less 



CICERO IN MAINE 15 

joy-inspiring than when he announced, giving 
to each syllable its full value, " Jay lese belles 
pantou-flees de ma bellemare," or clothed 
himself gayly in the ribbons of his father-in- 
law. 

It was when the French recitation had 
ended, however, and the old brick schoolhouse 
was left to our undisturbed possession, that 
we sat around the great sheet-iron stove, 
with no light but the red blur of the setting 
sun through the western windows, and told 
all things that ever we knew. On one Tues- 
day afternoon in particular, I remember, the 
talk began with that tale of the celebrated 
wooden horse which Virgil makes ^Eneas tell 
as a sort of after-dinner story in the second 
book of the ^Eneid. Our teacher, always hop- 
ing against hope that he might some day 
interest us in his beloved Virgil, had that 
afternoon been dwelling on the great poet's 
talent as a raconteur. 

It is needless to say that we rejected the 
whole narrative as puerile. The school gen- 
ius, indeed, made some modifying reflections 
in regard to the primitiveness of the age in 



i6 CICERO IN MAINE 

which the deception was located. " I s'pose 
we ought to consider " — he began deprecat- 
ingly, but the uncouth lad brusquely inter- 
rupted, — 

" We ain't got to consider nothin'," he de- 
clared, " except that the' wan't any last one 
of 'em 't had any more head 'n a carpet tack." 

" A wooden hoss," the class orator sneered, 
taking up the theme ; " poh ! 't would n't fool 
a baby. My little brother had one for a 
Christmas present, an' 't would n't go into 
his stockin', so mother took an' hitched it on 
with a string." 

" I '11 bait ye, sir," the uncouth lad declaimed 
oratorically, "that we couldn't 'a' fooled the 
rebels with any wooden hoss when we was 
tryin' to take Richmond. If they 'd seen us 
drawin' off an' leavin' any such contrivance 
round to hitch to their stockin', they 'd said, 
* No, thank ye. We ain't keepin' Christmas 
this year, an' if we was, the Yankees ain't no 
Santy Claus.' " 

" What do you think," asked the girl who 
was quick to learn, " of the man that came 
into school to-day ? " It was a part of her 



CICERO IN MAINE 17 

adaptability that she knew how to change a 
subject in season to prevent it from growing 
threadbare. 

We lived within two miles of the State 
capitol, and in all the high moments of life 
we felt ourselves enhaloed by the shadow of 
its dome. The State legislature was in ses- 
sion, and our visitor that day had been one of 
the members of this august body. Our gen- 
eration was much less sophisticated than the 
present up-to-date class of young people, and 
for us very simple things frequently assumed 
heroic proportions. To our admiring eyes 
this visitor was not a mere country lawyer, 
with that taste for the literature of Latin 
which many country lawyers used to possess, 
— he was a wise and powerful being, who 
created laws out of his inner consciousness, 
and hobnobbed with principalities and pow- 
ers, and we venerated him accordingly. The 
teacher had informed him of our intimacy 
with Cicero, and when, at the close of the 
recitation, the great man " addressed " us, he 
had the acumen to leave the ordinary plati- 
tudes unsaid, and draw from the Roman 



18 CICERO IN MAINE 

orator's life and words the message of that 
nobler patriotism, that larger citizenship, 
whose ideal forever appeals to ardent souls 
with the thrill of a passion for which men 
have been content to die. 

When the girl who was quick to learn re- 
called our visitor to our minds the thrill came 
back too, and our eyes turned toward the red 
streamers in the darkening west, as if they 
were the banners of victory beckoning us on. 

" Le 's go up to the legislature to-morrow," 
the slow girl suddenly suggested, seized by 
an unwonted inspiration ; and with one accord 
we assented, for Wednesday afternoon would 
be a holiday. 

When, next day, we met at the appointed 
hour for our long walk, the afternoon seemed 
to have been created for our purpose. It was 
one of those clear, bracing winter days when 
the snowy path echoes crisply under one's 
tread, and snow and sky melt into a dazzle, 
whose blended light and color is emphasized 
by the dark shapes of feathery pine and fir 
trees. 

It must not be thought that our little com- 



CICERO IN MAINE 19 

pany dallied along in couples absorbed in 
any sentimental discourse. On the contrary, 
we marched by threes, the boys leading the 
way, the girls briskly keeping pace. The 
road which we followed was then, and to me 
is to this day, rilled with childhood memories 
of " the war," and it was of these things that 
we discoursed as we went along. That com- 
monplace-looking, hip-roofed farmhouse had 
been the military pesthouse, and awesome 
associations lingered around it still ; in yonder 
field a battery had once encamped, and one 
of the girls related the story of how, at the 
venturesome age of twelve, she, with several 
companions of equally mature years, having 
wandered within the limits of the camp, had 
been promptly arrested and haled before the 
commanding officer, the terrors of whose 
cross-examination had been little mitigated by 
roars of laughter from surrounding listeners. 
The echoes of marching infantry and the 
beating hoofs of cavalry horses seemed to us 
hardly to have died from the air, and when 
we reached the State House at last we were 
keyed for heroic doings. 



20 CICERO IN MAINE 

The capitol building of our native State 
was to us, in those days, the grandest struc- 
ture in the world. I confess here that it has 
never lost its ancient charm for me. It stands 
on high ground, and I have seen its dome 
blur grandly into many sunrises and sunsets ; 
when one begins to mount the successive 
flights of broad, granite steps that lead to the 
majestic front entrance, one begins to say 
to one's "inward ear," "Here is a centre of 
deeds; here events are shaped for good or 
ill ; " and the fact that many of these shap- 
ings are trivial in themselves — sometimes, 
indeed, ill-shaped — does not altogether rob 
them of their significance in the eternal frame- 
work of things. 

As we entered the rotunda that day, our 
footsteps resounding on the floor seemed al- 
most an impertinence. We lingered to look 
at the portraits of the old-time governors in 
their gay coats ; we paused in sincere homage 
before the clustering battle-flags, which were 
then being gathered into the State House 
as their last, honored resting-place. A copy of 
Moses Owen's stirring poem, " The Returned 



CICERO IN MAINE 21 

Maine Battle- Flags," hung beside the sacred 
relics, and the class orator could not resist the 
opportunity to thrill us with its music. As 
he read he forgot himself and the place, and 
more than one hurrying foot checked itself at 
the sound, as if a sentinel had called " Halt ! " 

As the word is given — they charge ! they form ! 
And the dim hall rings with the battle's storm ! 
And once again through the smoke and strife 
Those colors lead to a nation's life. 

After numerous digressions we reached the 
gallery of the House of Representatives, and 
hung over the rail gazing at the mighty men 
below. The triviality of the subjects under 
discussion might, had we been maturer audi- 
tors, have served to dampen our heroic mood, 
but to us it was all mysteriously large and 
significant. When two honorable members 
chanced to indulge in lively recrimination, 
the uncouth lad was observed to murmur as 
in meditation, " How long, O Catiline," — 
the familiar phrase which had become to us 
like a household word. 

Once during the afternoon a large, blond 
young man, with a cherubic visage, rose in 



22 CICERO IN MAINE 

answer to a question, and drawled forth a 
reply which commanded the instant and 
amused attention of the house. 

" That 's Tom Reed," we heard somebody 
say, and we looked with quickened interest at 
a speaker who had already begun to make 
himself felt as a power. 

By and by there was a stir in the rear of 
the great hall as loitering men in the corri- 
dor greeted a fresh comer. Now Cicero was 
indeed among us ! We all knew that erect 
form, with the head gallantly thrown back, 
and the keen, dark eyes that had not then 
learned to question Fate otherwise than 
blithely, — the eyes that had ever a smile of 
quick recognition, as we well knew, for every 
boy and girl to whom their glance had been 
directed. It was little wonder that we all 
loved Mr. Blaine, — there was much about 
him that was supremely lovable. 

The usual routine of a visit to the State 
House included the climbing of the winding 
stairs which led to the cupola, to assure our- 
selves that Kennebec County remained se- 
curely anchored below ; but, on this occasion, 



CICERO IN MAINE 23 

as the short winter afternoon was waning fast, 
we contented ourselves with a visit to the 
massive stone balcony which opens from the 
second story. A tinge of rosy light was al- 
ready reflected in the eastern sky, and a few 
ambitious stars had begun to show them- 
selves. In front of us lay the " State grounds," 
which had so lately been a bustling camp, 
empty now and solitary save where a marble 
shaft glimmered whitely to mark the spot 
where some departed statesman had wrapped 
the drapery of his couch about him and lain 
down to pleasant dreams. Even the glimmer- 
ing line of the river was white, too. As we 
stood at the balustrade's edge, brooding over 
the landscape, life thrilled large within us, 
life uncomprehended, unformulated, the full 
cup, the fulfilled dream, which seem wholly 
possible only to the hopfulness of youth. 
When the 

whole soul revolves, the cup runs over, 
The world and life 's too big to pass for a dream. 

A large bird rose slowly in the distant sky, 
his wings showing black against the clear 
ether. " It's funny, too," the genius said, think- 



24 CICERO IN MAINE 

ing aloud ; " the Roman eagles, the Ameri- 
can eagle, — and those old chaps thought 
their birds were the emblems o' freedom 
jest as we think ours is ! Well, I don' 
know 's I 'd change James G. Blaine for old 
Cicero." 

In the middle of the Latin recitation next 
day the uncouth lad inquired abruptly, " What 
ever became o' him, anyhow, — I mean what 
end did he make ? " 

The teacher stared for a moment, uncom- 
prehending. " Oh, you mean Cicero ? " 

" Course," the uncouth one replied laconi- 
cally. 

Then the teacher — how fortunate it was 
for us that this wise man always knew how 
to seize the heart of an opportunity ! — gave 
us a brief sketch of the great Roman's life, 
showing us how his true nobleness over- 
balanced his political weaknesses and vanity. 
He — the teacher — " knew a man " who had 
visited Tusculum and seen the spot where 
the ruins of Cicero's villa still stand, with the 
great ivy tree growing against the sunny 
wall. He told us of the neighbors whose 



CICERO IN MAINE 25 

country houses surrounded Cicero's dwelling, 

— Caesar, Pompey, Brutus, the poet Catullus, 

Lucullus, celebrated for his feasts, with whom 

Cicero used to exchange books, — names 

these were to conjure with. He told us, too, 

of our hero's beloved daughter, his little 

Tullia, and her early death ; and he made it 

all more real by reminding us that this was 

the same Tusculum with whose long, "white 

streets " we were so familiar in Macaulay's 

poem. Here the class orator's lips began to 

move, and we knew that he was muttering 

dumbly, — 

From the white streets of Tusculum, 
The proudest town of all. 

He had often declaimed it. 

When the narrator went on to describe 
how Cicero, betrayed and deserted, was finally 
assassinated, the fatal blow being struck by 
a man whom he had formerly defended, 
the uncouth lad, forgetting the dignity of the 
place and hour, brought his hand down on 
his knee with a resounding smack, and de- 
clared in quivering tones, " I call it gol-darned 
mean ! " 



26 CICERO IN MAINE 

All this passed years ago. The girl who 
was quick to learn and the school genius 
both heard the call early in life to that land 
where naught but evil is ever forgotten, and 
where insight is divine and eternal. The girl 
who never forgot has spent her powers in 
patiently bestowing her accumulations on 
others ; the class orator has disseminated his 
gifts of language through the pen rather than 
the persuasive voice ; and it was, after all, the 
uncouth lad, uncouth no longer, magnificent 
in stature and in wisdom, who, on a well- 
remembered day, rolled grandly forth that 
noble address on Christian Citizenship. 

There was a lump in my throat when I 
heard him say, " My own first conscious im- 
pulse towards making a good citizen of myself 
dates from the time when I was awkwardly but 
enthusiastically translating Cicero's orations 
in the old brick schoolhouse in my native 
town. I was fortunate enough to begin the 
study of Latin under a teacher who taught 
with the spirit and the understanding also, 
and who had the magnetic power of mak- 
ing his pupils realize that every great Ian- 



CICERO IN MAINE 27 

guage possesses a soul as well as an an- 
atomy." 

When I stood before that former uncouth 
lad at the close of his discourse, and saw him 
look at me questioningly, as one who dimly 
divines a ghost of the past, I said to him, — 
since it is generally wiser to laugh than to 
cry, — " Avez-vous les pantoufles de velours 
de l'epicier ? " 

He seized my hand in a mighty grasp of 
recognition and welcome : " I have, — and 
those of the butcher and baker and candle- 
stick-maker as well. The women in my parish 
were always sending 'em to me before I was 
married." 

But, when all is said, the true link between 
us, in the new as in the old day, was something 
in which the grocer's velvet slippers had little 
part : that which made our old school days 
worth remembering, the image which shaped 
itself in both our minds as we stood there, — 

One and one with a shadowy third — 

was that of the wise schoolmaster, who had 
known how to draw us into the grand cir- 



28 CICERO IN MAINE 

cle where old Rome and young America — 
all nations, indeed, and all races of men — 
were made one and indivisible in the death- 
less continuity of a moral ideal. 



II 

A PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS 
READER 



A PLEA FOR THE SHIFT- 
LESS READER 

A CERTAIN "stark and sufficient man " 
called Michel de Montaigne, an old 
Gascon whom Emerson tells us he found 
" still new and immortal," once wrote : " There 
is more ado to interpret interpretations than 
to interpret the things, and more books upon 
books than upon all other subjects ; we do 
nothing but comment upon one another." 

Not long ago I stood in one of the win- 
dowed alcoves of a college library, looking 
with wearied gaze at shelves containing row 
after row of these same " books upon books," 
set there for the assistance of the student 
in interpreting interpretations. With the 
contents of many of them I was familiar ; I 
knew the helpful criticism which they some- 
times offered to the perplexed seeker ; I knew, 
too, the cheerful readiness with which they 



32 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

stood prepared to snuff the immortal spark 
out of genius, grind the inspiration out of in- 
spiration, and distill a fog of commonplace- 
ness over the consecration and the poet's 
dream; and I asked myself whether, if it 
were proposed to pass a law making the pro- 
fession of criticism punishable with death, I 
should use my influence in favor of behead- 
ing the critic, or be content to let him escape 
with imprisonment for life. 

It is true, one may say of critics, as of in- 
toxicants, that both the use and the abuse of 
them is a matter of personal choice ; but this, 
like most general statements, cannot be alto- 
gether proved. The critic is always stealing 
insidiously upon us in the magazines, creep- 
ing into the columns of the newspapers, 
foisting his opinions upon us before we real- 
ize it, finding weak places in our favorite 
sonnets, pointing out to us that the poems 
we love best are not " high poetry," suggest- 
ing that the authors we delight in are ephem- 
eral creatures destined to live but a day ; 
and such is the web he weaves around us 
that, unconsciously, we accept him at his 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 33 

own valuation, and forget that he too is 
mortal. 

It may be that I love the sonnet, as I love 
my friend, all the more because it is faulty ; 
it may be that the minor poet appeals to me 
more than the high poet, — that I find in the 
author who is not a god something that rouses 
my aspiration and satisfies my need. My 
friend the critic, who, as Montaigne has it, 
" will chew my meat for me," tells me that 
my judgment is wrong and my taste per- 
verted, because neither coincides with his 
own. In spite of the bonds thus imposed on 
me I have a right to arraign the decisions of 
the critic himself, since nothing is truer than 
that it is difficult for the wisest man to judge 
his contemporaries justly, and that every 
man's taste is more or less influenced by in- 
dividual temperament and training. 

" What is history," said Napoleon, " but a 
fable agreed upon ? " No man could justly 
ask that question in regard to criticism, be- 
cause every critic brings to his task the col- 
oring of his own mind and temperament, and 
does not necessarily agree with any other. 



34 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

Even after he has dissected his literary 
prey, and laid bare its anatomy, flesh and 
blood, sinews and bones, there yet remains 
in his mind an involuntary bias, because he 
really likes the thing or really dislikes it. 

It is precisely for this right of individual 
judgment and individual taste that I plead. 
In this age, when so many people are pain- 
fully, laboriously, and conscientiously making 
a study of literature, agonizing themselves 
in interpreting interpretations, it gives one a 
thrill of joy to remember that one has an un- 
doubted right to read the author and omit 
the interpretation, and to say boldly, "I like 
this," or " I do not like that," without being 
obliged by any law of the land to give a rea- 
son for the faith that is in him. It is per- 
fectly legitimate for the humblest reader on 
earth to dissent from the judgments of au- 
thors, critics, and all other geniuses, however 
godlike, and recklessly, shamelessly, to form 
his own uninspired opinions, and stick to 
them, — all the more that the godlike ones 
themselves have been known to differ widely 
in their decisions. 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER ' 35 

Emerson, for instance, tells us in his " Eng- 
lish Traits " that Scott's poems are a mere 
traveler's itinerary. Ruskin, on the contrary, 
finds in Scott the typical literary mind of his 
age, and his artist eye unfailingly discerns 
the color chord in the poet's descriptions 
of nature ; but if neither Emerson, Ruskin, 
nor any other mighty one of the earth had 
found anything to praise in Scott's poetry, I 
am not therefore compelled to forget the 
sense of bounding life and joy with which, 
in my girlhood, I first read The Lady of 
the Lake, Marmion, and The Lay of the Last 
Minstrel. 

For me Scott's poems were alive. His 
armies marched, his watch-fires burned, his 
alarums sounded. The printed page was full 
of the inexhaustible energy of the man who 
wrote it; with him I climbed the hill and 
trod the heather, and the full tide of his love 
for everything romantic and chivalrous and 
Scotch swept me along in its current. When 
I became a woman, with children of my own., 
I read these poems to them with the same 
sense of having discovered a new country, 



36 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

a land full of color and romance, and I 
read to listeners who were never tired of 
hearing. 

I remember that those young auditors 
asked a hundred eager questions, and that in 
the questionings and the replies we all found 
fresh inspiration ; but the questions were 
never those of analysis. The children gave 
themselves up to the joy of the narrative, and 
the message that it brought stole upon them 
as unconsciously as the sound of the rushing 
mountain breeze steals on the accustomed 
ear. It was, perhaps, my duty, as a wise 
parent, to have taught them to pull every- 
thing they read to pieces, and put it together 
again, as one does a dissected map ; but if I 
had done so, the poem or the story, like the 
map, would henceforth have seemed to their 
imagination a thing ready to crumble to 
pieces at a touch. 

I remember, too, the message these poems 
brought to another life, — that of a man who 
lived in a remote mountain village, knew lit- 
tle of Emerson or Ruskin, and cared not a 
jot for critics or criticism. I fell in with him 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 37 

one day when I was taking a long walk along 
the beautiful country road on which his farm 
lands bordered, — a taciturn-looking, shaggy- 
browed old farmer, yet with a twinkle in his 
eye that contradicted the sternness of his 
face when in repose. He invited me to ride 
with him, and our conversation started from 
the book I held in my hand. 

" I guess you 're a reader," he said, " or you 
would n't be carrying a book with you on 
such a long walk." 

" Yes," I answered, " I am something of a 
reader. I do not read much on a walk like 
this, but I have a fancy that a book is a good 
companion." 

" My father used to run of a notion," he 
told me presently, " that reading was a clear 
waste of time, but mother liked to read. I 
guess she went hungry for books the most 
of her life. I took after her in liking books, 
though I ain't never read any too many ; but 
when she went to Bangor one time, when I 
was 'bout seventeen year old, she brought 
me a copy of Walter Scott's poetry, an' I 've 
thought a good many times 't that book made 



38 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

a difference in my whole life. I think likely 
you 've read it ? " 

" Yes, and enjoyed it. 5 ' 

" Well, I set by it in the first place because 
I knew what it meant to mother to buy it. 
Her money come hard, an' books cost more 
then than what they do now. I s'pose I had 
naturally more of a romantic streak in me than 
most farmers' boys, an' it jest needed such a 
book as that to wake it up. I 'd always no- 
ticed the sky and the mountains and the like 
a good deal, an' after that mother 'n ? I begun 
to pick out places round here an' name 'em 
for places in the book. You 'd laugh now if 
I told you the names I 've give 'em in my 
mind ever since ; but I don't laugh, because 
I remember what comfort mother got out of 
it. She located Edinburgh over there behind 
that farthest hill you see ; an' I declare, she 
talked about it so much I ain't never ben 
sure to this day that it ain't there. I think 
likely all this seems foolish to you ? " 

" On the contrary," I said, " I think there 's 
an admirable sort of common sense about it." 

" I 'm pretty sure I picked me out a differ- 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 39 

ent kind of a wife from what I should if I 
had n't fallen in love with Ellen Douglas for 
my first sweetheart. I did n't choose her jest 
because she was pretty or smart, or could 
make good butter an' cheese. An' when I 'd 
got her, mother liked her, an' they lived happy 
together. Then, pretty soon, the war broke 
out. We lived 'way off here where we did n't 
hear much, an' we did n't get newspapers 
very often, an' father thought the main thing 
was to stay here on the farm an' raise a good 
crop o' potatoes an' apples ; but I was uneasy. 
I did n't think war was goin' to be all romance 
an' troubadours, but I kept sayin' to myself 
that here was my chance to show what kind 
of a man I was. 

" One day I had to go part way up Cedar 
Mountain, there, to hunt after a steer 't had 
strayed off ; an' when I looked away off an' 
saw the mountains all around the sky, an' 
the sun shinin' on the fields an' ponds, an' the 
trees wavin' their tops as if they was banners, 
I broke right out an' hollered : — 

" Where 's the coward that would not dare 
To fight for such a land ? 



40 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

" That settled it. I enlisted, an' stayed in 
the army till the war was over. 'T wan't all 
poetry, but there ain't any part o' my life 't I 
feel any better satisfied with. I was lucky. 
I did n't get hurt to speak of till the Rebs 
put a bullet into my shoulder at Gettysburg, — 
an' that reminds me o' somethin'. The third 
day o' the fight, when our boys was waitin' 
for orders, an' we could see the regiments all 
round us goin' into action, there was some- 
thin' goin' through my mind over 'n' over as 
if it was wound up an' went by machinery ; 
an' that night, when I was layin' there 
wounded an' mighty uncomfortable, it come 
to me like a flash what it was. You know 
how a thing '11 get into your head an' keep 
buzzin' there. I was sayin' to myself : — 

" The stubborn spearmen still made good 
Their dark, impenetrable wood, 
Each stepping where his comrade stood 
The instant that he fell." 

This man, who knew nothing about critics 
and criticism, had involuntarily chosen, in 
his moment of high impulse and emotion, the 
very passage which the authorities have pro- 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 41 

nounced as Homeric as anything in Homer. 
I doubt if it would have meant half as much 
to him if he had ever pulled it to pieces, to 
ask himself why it moved him, or if he had 
any rhetorical right to be moved by it at 
all. 

It has been my good fortune, on one or 
two occasions, to wait for a car in a little sta- 
tion which is evidently a rendezvous for two 
plain-looking men, farmers from their appear- 
ance, who seem to meet in this place now and 
then for the purpose of talking over their fa- 
vorite literature. I have heard them discuss 
Thomson's " Seasons," Young's " Night 
Thoughts," and poems of Goldsmith, Crabbe, 
Collins, and others. One of them finds his 
greatest enjoyment in reading Rogers's 
" Pleasures of Memory ; " the other, on a bright 
winter day, discoursed so lovingly of Cowper's 
" Task " that I came home and read it with a 
new comprehension. They search out the 
beauties, and not the flaws, of their favorite 
authors ; they never — apparently — stop to 
ask themselves whether these are the writers 
that persons of trained literary taste ought 



42 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

to enjoy ; and they will probably go down to 
their graves in happy oblivion of the fact that 
they have never chosen the " highest " poetry. 

I do not wish to be understood as condemn- 
ing the training that helps the student to 
distinguish between good and bad literature, 
but I do mean to say that if the reader has 
not that within his own soul which interprets 
to him the indefinable something which we 
call genius, it will never be revealed to him 
by catechisms and anatomical processes. " I 
hate to be tied down," Tennyson once said, 
" to say that ' this means that! because the 
thought within the image is much more than 
any one interpretation." 

There are, at present, a multitude of wom- 
an's clubs in America, most of which are 
studying the works of some author or authors. 
For their use and profit and that of similar 
seekers after truth, Outline Studies have been 
provided. I have before me, as I write, such 
a handbook on Lowell, of which Mr. Lowell 
himself wrote (we are told), " The little book 
both interested and astonished me." I choose 
some questions from it at random, asking the 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 43 

reader to supply the answers which naturally 
occur to the mind as he reads : — 

" To whom was the * Invitation ' addressed ? 
The objects and requirements of travel ? 
Could the small portmanteau hold Lowell's 
outfit ? " (And if not, why did he not take a 
bigger one ?) " Have Americans, especially 
Western Americans, any genuine love of 
trees? How is it with Lowell? Have you 
seen his Genealogical Tree ? In what month 
is Lowell happiest? And you? In what 
seasons and moods can Lowell ' bear nothin* 
closer than the sky ' ? What hint does he 
give of a home not far from Boston ? " and 
so on, indefinitely. 

It hardly seems that Lowell's poetry could 
have the juice taken out of it more thoroughly 
if one went on to inquire : " Does Lowell say 
anywhere that he had been vaccinated? 
Which are New Englanders generally said 
to prefer, pies or puddings ? Compare Bar- 
low's ' Hasty Pudding' and Whittier's 'The 
Pumpkin' with Lowell's reference in 'The 
Courtin" to Huldy parin' apples. Would 
you gather from the text that Lowell had 



44 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

an especial preference for apple pies? And 
you ? " 

I was once present at the session of a Bible 
class in a country church, where the topic 
under discussion was the story of Daniel in 
the lions' den. The teacher asked each mem- 
ber of the class, one after the other, " What 
do you suppose Daniel's thoughts were, when 
he found himself in this dangerous position ? " 
The answers given varied more or less ac- 
cording to the gifts of imagination possessed 
by different individuals, but the last person 
to whom the question was addressed, a heavy- 
looking man, who seemed to have been pain- 
fully anticipating the moment when this de- 
mand should be made on his intellect, replied 
slowly, as if struggling with the depth of his 
thought, "Why — I s'pose — he thought — 
he was in — a den o' lions ! " 

It seems to me that the attempt to inter- 
pret genius by the Socratic method must 
frequently bring forth replies as concise and 
practical as that of the man in the Bible class. 
The most perfect piece of literature may be 
rendered absurd by such a catechism. 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 45 

We go to a physician for advice about diet, 
but when he has given it we do not expect 
him to digest our food for us. So, when the 
student has been taught in a general way 
what is admirable in literature, it is not ne- 
cessary for the teacher to go on labeling every 
page with, " This is a fine passage." " Do 
not admire this line ; the metaphor is faulty," 
and so on. If the reader is ever to develop 
into a thinker, he must learn to dispense with 
such literary guide-posts. 

When I was a pupil in the high school, 
translating Virgil, I remember how my spirit 
rose in rebellion when the footnotes gushed 
like this: — 

" Suffusa oculos : wet as to her shining eyes 
with tears. Female beauty never appears so 
engaging, and makes so deep an impression 
on the reader, as when suffused with tears 
and manifesting a degree of anxious solici- 
tude. The poet therefore introduces Venus 
in that situation, making suit to her father. 
The speech is of the chastest kind, and can- 
not fail to charm the reader." 

I had it in me to have had some dim appre- 



46 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

ciation of the /Eneid, if I had been let alone. 
Indeed, there comes clearly to my mind at 
this moment the memory of a sunny morning, 
when, in a day-dream, I beheld a certain Sici- 
lian youth, clad in an embroidered cloak of 
Iberian purple, stand forth to be shot down 
by a Tuscan arrow. He lived somewhere in 
the ninth book of the JEneid; and when I 
found that the emotional commentator was 
not suffused as to his shining eyes with tears, 
I felt at liberty to mourn for the fair youth 
whose violet mantle faded so long ago. I am 
still distinctly grateful to the compiler of foot- 
notes for omitting to deliver a funeral oration. 
There are no beauties like those one discovers 
for one's self, and no emotions as sweet as 
those which are never put into words. 

Every real work of genius holds in it much 
more than the author himself knew, and each 
reader interprets it, as he interprets God, 
according to the poverty or riches of his own 
nature ; yet, even so, that interpretation, 
meagre though it may be, which comes to 
him out of the struggle of his spirit is worth 
more to him than all the rest. 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 47 

It is a great step gained when one has 
shaken off the bondage of feeling obliged to 
comprehend at once everything that one ad- 
mires. It is perfectly possible to enjoy a 
thing, even to get some degree of good out 
of it, before one has arrived at any accurate 
understanding of its meaning. " No complex 
or very important truth," De Quincey tells 
us, " was ever yet transferred in full develop- 
ment from one mind to another. Truth of 
that character is not a piece of furniture to be 
shifted ; it is a seed which must be sown and 
pass through the several stages of growth. 
No doctrine of importance can be transferred 
in a matured state into any man's understand- 
ing from without ; it must arise by an act of 
genesis within the understanding itself." 

There is nothing strange in the fact that 
an ordinary mind cannot at once and entirely 
comprehend the message of an extraordinary 
one ; but one may be caught at first by mere 
beauty of language, by rhythm and swing, by 
some faint glimmer of significance, elusive 
but divine ; and by and by, when experience 
and love and joy and sorrow and pain have 



48 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

gone on day by day offering their commen- 
taries on all the meanings of life, one may 
wake suddenly to know that the interpreta- 
tion he vainly sought has come while he was 
unconscious of it. Your message may not be 
mine, mine may not be as richly full as that 
of another, but sooner or later each one comes 
to his own. 

" It is all nonsense to talk about enjoying 
what you don't understand," a gruff old pro- 
fessor of rhetoric said to me once. After the 
finality of this dictum, it was a pleasure to 
find, soon after, a book written by another 
distinguished authority on rhetoric, in which 
he quotes the following lines from " A Gram- 
marian's Funeral," with the confession that, 
although he likes them very much, he does 
not know what they mean : — 

Sleep, crop and herd ! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, 

Safe from the weather ! 
He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, 

Singing together, 
He was a man born with thy face and throat, 

Lyric Apollo ! 
Long he lived nameless : how should Spring take note 

Winter would follow ? 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 49 

Such an admission on the part of an accom- 
plished scholar encourages one to hope that, 
after all, even rhetoricians — some of them — 
are but men, and that they too may acquire 
a reprehensible appetite for odds and ends of 
prose and poetry which — to speak accurately 
— choose themselves, by one knows not what 
principle of selection, and persist in clinging 
in the mind and attaching themselves to it 
like burs. 

What real lover of reading has not such a 
collection of tramp quotations, which haunt 
him, apropos, frequently, of nothing at all? 
Right gypsies they are; but all the joy of 
their vagabondage would be lost, if one felt 
obliged to sort them, analyze their charm, and 
store them away, each in its own pigeonhole, 
labeled " Hope," " Memory," and so on. 

It is often claimed that the spirit of our 
age is a reaction from Puritanism, but it 
seems to me that there are still a good many 
people who feel that there must be something 
sinful in reading anything that one really en- 
joys. They grind away at the chosen volume, 
whatever it may be, trembling as they ask 



50 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

themselves : " Ought I to like this ? Is it the 
sort of thing a truly intellectual person would 
approve ? " Their eyes are blinded, so that 
they never realize how, all the while, other 
happy souls are led on little by little, from 
flowery peak to peak, until they find them- 
selves unconsciously treading with serene 
footsteps the heights where the masters dwell, 
the paths where duty is transfigured into de- 
light. 

The reader who begins by enjoying Long- 
fellow may end with a genuine appreciation 
of Milton and Browning; in the meantime, 
if he never attains to that proud preeminence, 
there is no law making the offense punish- 
able with death. In literature, as in life, one 
has a right to choose one's own friends. The 
man who has poetry enough in his soul to 
thrill when King Olaf's war horns ring 

Over the level floor of the flood 

is not wholly without knowledge of the mys- 
tic voices that call. Charles Lamb tells us 
that the names of Marlowe, Drayton, Drum- 
mond of Hawthornden, and Cowley — minor 



PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 51 

poets all — carry a sweeter perfume to him 
than those of Milton and Shakespeare. A 
man whom I once knew, a German scholar 
of some repute, entitled also to add D. D. and 
Ph. D. to his name, sent me Rider Haggard's 
" Dawn " as his notion of a really good story. 
His taste and mine differed widely, yet I was 
willing that he should live. I was even able 
to understand how a man of naturally active 
and adventurous spirit, compelled by force of 
circumstances to content himself with a con- 
fined and quiet life, might find some sort of 
outlet in this rampant sensationalism. 

There are good authors and eloquent au- 
thors and "high" authors enough to go 
around amongst us all, and allow us one or 
two decently creditable favorites apiece ; and 
occasionally, in this bleak world of duty, it 
ought to be permitted us to go browsing over 
the whole field of literature just for the very 
deliciousness of it, searching out the forgot- 
ten nooks, cropping the tender herbage, and 
drinking the golden filter where the sunlight 
drips through the thick branches of hidden 
trees. Let us cast aside our literary con- 



52 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 

sciences, and taking our authors to our 
hearts, laugh with them, cry with them, 
struggle and strive and aspire and triumph 
with them, and refrain from picking their 
bones. 

This is a stern and exacting and workaday 
world ; it demands analysis and accuracy and 
purpose ; it expects every one of us to be able 
to reduce life to a mathematical quantity and 
extract the square root therefrom. The man 
who works and exacts and analyzes and pur- 
poses is the man who succeeds, — as the world 
counts success, — yet it is none the less true 

that 

A dreamer lives forever, 

And a toiler dies in a day. 



Ill 

THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 



THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE 

WOMAN 



ONCE upon a time — that is the way 
good stories used always to begin — 
a certain Maine town electrified itself by 
choosing a woman to serve on its superin- 
tending school committee, and — to precipi- 
tate myself into the narrative as dramatically 
as possible — I was that woman. 

Towns, as well as individuals, are subject 
to occasional lapses from sound judgment, 
and that I was the victim offered to the gods 
in this particular case was as fortuitous an 
occurrence as the aberration itself. It did not 
seem that I was thus distinguished above my 
peers on account of any especial fitness for 
the position, since the only reason I ever 



56 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

heard alleged for the choice was the state- 
ment offered by one of the members of the 
nominating committee that I " had nothing 
else to do." I may add in passing that two 
years later, when the town became a city and 
the school committee was transformed into a 
school board, my name was dropped from 
the list on the ground that during my term 
of office I had " done nothing," a result at 
which, as it seems to me, no one had a right 
to complain, since it was the only one to be 
expected from the given premises. 

I was away from home at the time the 
election took place, and when I returned to 
find my unprepared feet suddenly planted 
upon the ladder of greatness, my earliest 
sensations were those of unmitigated dismay. 
In the first place, granting the alleged pre- 
mises, namely, that I had nothing else to do, 
as a just reason for election to office, there 
seemed to be no limit to the surprises the 
future might have in store. I might awake 
on some melancholy morning to find myself 
President of the United States. Second, when 
I remembered with meekness the position I 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 57 

occupied in the voting — or non-voting — list, 
— "women, Indians, idiots, and minors," I 
asked myself how it happened that I was 
eligible for office. Was it possible to discrim- 
inate in this manner against the rest of my 
class, and might I not, by accepting the 
greatness thrust upon me, be opening the 
door to Indians and idiots also ? 

When I mentioned these misgivings to my 
friends they unanimously advised me to re- 
sign myself, but not the office. 

" As far as idiots are concerned," A said 
cheerfully, " the door has been open to them 
a long time." " And in regard to your feeling 
of unfitness for the position," B suggested en- 
couragingly, " you have only to remember the 
old story of the father's advice to his boy on 
leaving home : ' Keep your mouth shut, and 
people won't find out what a fool you are ! ' " 

Thus panoplied in the optimism of my 
friends, I examined my qualifications as they 
stood in my own mind, and found that they 
were mainly negative. 

I had never taught school. My only rela- 
tion toward public schools in the past had 



58 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

been one of those which the pupil naturally 
and inevitably assumes toward the teacher, — 
either that of active partisanship or armed 
neutrality. I had no prejudices to overcome, 
no theories to work out, no ideas that had any 
sufficient reason for being. I was conscious 
that I knew a great deal more about my 
neighbors' affairs than I did about a com- 
mon denominator, and that if an examina- 
tion in elementary branches were proposed 
to me I should take to the woods. Indeed, I 
have a distinct recollection of one occasion 
early in my career as an office-holder, when 
an examination in arithmetic was pending 
in one of the grammar school grades, and I 
sought my young son, to whom mathematical 
studies presented comparatively few difficul- 
ties, for advice and assistance in preparing 
for the ordeal. He was engaged in some boy- 
ish avocation out of doors, and I sat beside 
him on a sunny bank while the business in 
hand was settled. When I rose to go, I left 
him soliloquizing as one more in sorrow than 
surprise, " And this is your school-committee 



woman ! ,: 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 59 

It will be perceived that I was very much 
in the position of a neophyte about to be 
initiated into mysteries. I sat down, as one 
may say, at the feet of The School System, 
all ready to absorb it at every pore. Not 
being of sufficiently logical mind, I was never 
able to reduce The System to any definite 
form, or to approach it from any but an ex- 
oteric standpoint. My position in regard to 
this mysterious bulwark of our nation has 
always been that of George Sampson in " Our 
Mutual Friend," when he says of Mrs. Wilfer's 
under petticoat, — viewed only by the eye 
of faith, " After all, you know, ma'am, we 
know it 's there ! " Now and then, at the full 
of the moon, when all the auspices seemed to 
favor, under the influence, let us say, of large 
doses of " McGuffey's Reader," or when I 
heard the most infantile of all the physiology 
classes reciting, 

My eyes, my ears, my nose, 

and so on to the triumphant finale of " my 
toes," — at such moments as these I almost 
caught the rustle of the advancing or retreat- 



60 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

ing skirts of The System, but I was, I fear, 
never worthy to have full vision of it. It is 
impossible, however, for the most unimpres- 
sionable school-committee woman to sit for- 
ever, like a bump on a log, and learn nothing 
in an atmosphere where wisdom is as plen- 
teous as dew. When a pupil bounded the 
United States, " On the North by Canada, on 
the east by Fairfield" (Maine), "on the south 
by the ' Artie ' Ocean, and on the west by 
Van Diemen's Land," though I doubted his 
geographical accuracy, I learned something 
about the vagaries of which the human mind 
is capable. 

The continuous, wearying routine of school 
life, the endless monotony combined with 
endless variation, the limitless demands on 
patience, the iteration and reiteration neces- 
sary to impress a single idea on the mind of 
the average pupil, — all these I marked, and 
gained from them some conception of the 
difficulty of the problem with which educa- 
tors are confronted, — a problem rendered the 
more discouraging by the fact that in its solu- 
tion it continually demands the impossible. 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 61 

Early in my career as a school-committee 
woman I began to make discoveries — dis- 
heartening discoveries — like the following : 
The educational problem is one whose work- 
ings can never be fully accounted for by the 
accepted laws of nature ; the only principle 
which can be relied upon as of universal ap- 
plication being the one which sets forth that 
the introduction of a new element will always 
produce perturbations. Moreover, to an or- 
dinary mind like my own, the constant con- 
templation of this problem had the effect of 
upsetting my previous theological convic- 
tions, and even of rendering the consolations 
of religion a doubtful quantity, since, after 
studying " the tricks and manners " of the 
aggregated youth of the community in- 
timately, the claim that they all possessed 
souls seemed absolutely untenable. If it was 
sometimes possible to believe of the children 
of the lower grades that 

Heaven lies about us in our infancy, 

it also seemed true beyond a doubt that 

Shades of the prison house begin to close 
Upon the growing boy, 



62 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

and whether his soul should be introduced to 
him — or he be introduced to his soul — 
by methods of outside or inside application 
became one of the most serious questions to 
be answered. 

My experiences as a school official ushered 
me into a new world, — a world of hitherto 
undreamed-of difficulties and responsibilities. 
At first I was disposed to dwell on the pos- 
sibilities of the situation under ideal con- 
ditions, but I speedily came down to earth, 
and began to ask myself what could be done 
with the materials at hand. I grew to love 
the bright faces of the children even at their 
naughtiest, — and that was sometimes very 
naughty, — but when, at the end of my two 
years' apprenticeship, I retired from my un- 
deserved eminence, I carried with me into 
the obscurity of private life the conviction, 
which has been growing ever since, that it 
is not the children, but the teachers, who 
stand in need of a champion. Indeed, my 
only reason for dragging my ancient honors 
with such a flourish of trumpets into public 
gaze is to give myself some apparent claim to 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 63 

hurl my glove into the arena in the teachers' 
behalf, and to hurl it so violently that some- 
body will know it is there, and so rise up and 
call me blessed — or the contrary ! 

A teacher is in the nature of things a crea- 
ture sui generis ; his world is not our world. 
Even Charles Lamb — even the gentle Elia 
— has his gibe at " the schoolmaster " in the 
midst of his pity for him because he is com- 
pelled in the very nature of things to regard 
the universe itself as an eternal lesson book. 
" The least part of what is to be expected of 
him " (the schoolmaster), Lamb tells us, " is 
to be done in school hours. He must insinu- 
ate knowledge at the mollia tempora fandi. 
He must seize every occasion — the season 
of the year, the time of day, a passing cloud, 
a rainbow, a wagon of hay, a regiment of 
soldiers going by — to inculcate something 
useful. Nothing comes to him not spoiled 
by the sophisticating medium of moral uses." 
A clergyman's profession offers the nearest 
parallel to that of a teacher, but the former 
is supposed to be under the direct guidance 
and protection of the higher powers, whereas 



64 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

the teacher, with most of the clergyman's 
responsibilities, is obliged to accept as his im- 
mediate Providence a school board of whom 
it is not always possible to say, " Of such is 
the kingdom of heaven." It is true that we, 
as parents, have more far-reaching duties 
toward our children than their teachers can 
have ; but if we do not choose to perform 
these duties, there is, unless we transgress 
the law of the land, no one who is entitled to 
call us to account. There are, however, pe- 
riods when we exist simply for the purpose of 
calling the teacher to account. Is he not paid 
out of the public treasury ? Go to, then ! if 
our children are not models, is it not his duty 
to make them so ? 

It is, to the initiated, a self-evident fact that 
for the thoroughly successful teacher there 
is but one standard : he must be an angel for 
temper, a demon for discipline, a chameleon for 
adaptation, a diplomatist for tact, an optimist 
for hope, and a hero for courage. To these 
common and easily developed qualities of 
mind and heart, he should add india-rubber 
nerves, and a cheerful willingness to trust a 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 65 

large portion of his reward to some other 
world than this. One of the most difficult 
phases of the teacher's profession is the fact 
that he, more than almost any other man, is 
at the mercy of theorists. Nearly every edu- 
cational dignitary who enters into the sub- 
ject with any energy of purpose brings his 
pet theories into the work with him, and who 
but the long-suffering teacher shall put those 
theories into action, and discover whether 
they have any practical basis? Oftentimes, 
unfortunately, the theories go on operating 
long after it has been sufficiently demonstrated 
that their basis is untenable. Take, for in- 
stance, the "development" theory, — which 
is intended, as far as one can judge, to de- 
velop the child at the expense of the teacher. 
This theory dispenses largely with the use of 
textbooks, being based on the idea that the 
child, if cut off from other sources of supply, 
can go on indefinitely spinning a thread out 
of his own inner consciousness. The teacher 
soon finds out that there is an inherent differ- 
ence between a child and a silk-worm, and 
that the latter is much better fitted by nature 



66 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

to furnish cocoons on a business basis. As a 
matter of fact, it is the teacher who does most 
of the spinning. One teacher writes me : " I 
am very much dissatisfied with the work in 
grammar, or ' language ' as it is now called. 
The pupils do not have books ; we write from 
year to year the lessons for the classes on the 
board. The pupils copy into blank books 
what is necessary. It seems to me drudgery 
for the teacher to be required to do so much 
unnecessary work. The pupils need some 
technical grammar, — need to know how to 
use books. One reason why Latin is so hard 
for them during their first year in the high 
school is that they do not know how to use 
an English grammar." 

It is tolerably obvious that when the pupil 
who is living from hand to mouth on the con- 
tents of a grammar book or a " sum book " of 
his own construction desires to know anything 
not contained in these invaluable classics, he 
must, unless he has become thoroughly versed 
in the cocoon process, ask his teacher, who 
thus becomes the final authority in these 
branches. I once heard of a young man who, 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 67 

when teaching a country school, was much 
disturbed by an unpleasant tendency on the 
part of his pupils to ask him the definitions 
of words with which he was not familiar. 
One day, resorting in his exasperation to the 
vernacular of his youth, which seemed to him 
to make the statement doubly emphatic, he 
put an end to these inquiries. " I want you 
to remember," he said with decision, " that 
I ain't no dictionary!" I imagine that the 
teacher referred to and others similarly sit- 
uated have long desired to proclaim freely 
and to all whom it may concern, " I ain't no 
grammar ! " 

Another comment upon the workings of 
the cocoon theory is that which I have many 
times heard from high school teachers who 
complain that pupils coming from the gram- 
mar grades are so accustomed to being carried 
along by the teacher that the work of teach- 
ing them methods of independent thought is 
an exceedingly difficult one. The same com- 
plaint is made by grammar school teachers 
whose graduates — as is the custom in some 
schools — are admitted to the high school on 



68 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

probation for two months, at the end of 
which time, " if unable or unwilling " to keep 
up with the class, they can be sent back to 
the grammar school. " I contend that it is 
not fair," says one teacher. " The pupils can- 
not in two months' time get used to the 
change from grammar to high school meth- 
ods, inasmuch as in the high they are thrown 
on their own resources, while in the grammar 
they are spurred on by the teacher." There 
is one gleam of hope in regard to these 
methods of child development. The people 
who are making a specialty of child study 
with a view to being able eventually to take 
the dear little victims apart like dissected 
maps, and, by combining Tommy's superior 
abilities with Willie's unresting energy and 
Samuel's moral virtues, construct a model 
for the species, — these wise philosophers, it 
seems to me, must sooner or later discover 
that the amount of spinning material in a 
child's interior has been overestimated, and 
that the dreamed-of cocoon process is only 
another instance of " The desire of the moth 
for the star " ! 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 69 

Another modern notion which helps to 
make the path of the school-teacher a thorny- 
one is the theory that a child ought to be 
putting out simultaneously and in every di- 
rection as many feelers as a centipede has 
legs. As a matter of fact, a pupil who has 
learned thoroughness and application has 
acquired something, even if he cannot explain 
the precession of the equinoxes or tell how 
many feathers there are in a hen. There 
used, in the former days, to be a good many 
poetic similes in which the unfolding of a 
child's mind was likened to the gradual open- 
ing of a flower, leaf by leaf. The revised 
plan admits of no such sentimental and slow- 
moving processes. A child's mind is now 
opened like an umbrella, expanding equally 
and instantaneously at all points, and, for- 
tunately for the child, it also resembles the 
umbrella in that it sheds a good deal more 
than it retains. 

Perhaps I can best illustrate what is at- 
tempted in this expansive process by giving 
an actual schedule of work, furnished me by 
a teacher in grammar grades. The teacher in 



70 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

question has had long experience, and is 
deeply interested in her work, in which she 
has been most successful. It is, in fact, be- 
cause she has an exalted ideal of what a 
teacher's work should be that she complains 
of the constantly increasing demands which 
make it impossible for her to do work satis- 
factory to herself in any department. 

I give her details of regular classes and 
" extras," with some of the comments added 
by herself : — 

" Two classes reading ; try to study author's 
meaning, give expression to same ; tell about 
author ; phonics in lower grades. Two classes 
spelling ; definitions ; use of words in sen- 
tences. Two classes geography. The geog- 
raphy taught is mostly physical. The pupil 
learns very little of his own country, does n't 
even know the names and capitals of States. 
I asked one of mine to point out Boston on 
the map, and, to my surprise, she hunted in 
the woods of Maine ! 

" Two classes history. Two classes gram- 
mar. Two classes arithmetic. 

" These classes constitute the regular pro- 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 71 

gramme. Add to these the following ex- 
tras : — 

" On Mondays we have the ' American 
Citizen.' Write Greek stories each week. 
Twice each week, writing. Once a week 
physiology, including hygiene and temper- 
ance. Twice a term study some poem and 
send result to superintendent. 

" Our music teacher comes once in two 
weeks. He selects one or two pieces of music, 
and we teach the pupils. In two weeks more 
he comes to see the results of our work. 
Pupils must sing every day. The special 
teacher in gymnastics comes once in two 
weeks and takes the class herself, after which 
we give lessons each day until she comes 
again. Our next extra teacher is in mechan- 
ical drawing. He teaches only in the high 
school and highest grammar grade. We have 
had no instruction in geometry. He went 
to the board and drew an equilateral tri- 
angle, tried to get the name from pupils. 
I finally told him that I doubted if they 
had ever heard the word. He said they 
would have to do most of the figures by 



72 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

copying them. I question the advantage 
gained. 

" We have also questions in physics, copied 
on cards and sent to the principals of each 
grammar grade. These have been given to 
the pupils to try at home and afterwards at 
school. Have not yet had time to test results. 

" Instead of examinations at the end of the 
term, as formerly, we now give tests each 
month, so that I always have sets of papers 
to be corrected and ranked. We get the total 
average of all, the average of each study, the 
class standing, our estimate of each pupil, — 
which we guess at, — and then the general 
average. If you add to our course some of 
the requirements of the larger cities, — man- 
ual training, sewing, cooking, algebra, Latin, 
science, and geometry, you can see how the 
grammar school course has been overcrowded, 
— ■ enriched,' they call it, — and why it is so 
hard for us to do thorough work, with so many 
things to cram into the poor children's brains." 

I confess that, as far as I am personally 
concerned, when I reached this point in the 
narrative I positively declined to " add " any- 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 73 

thing more. I was already mentally black 
and blue, and felt that one more extra would 
be more than flesh could bear. Indeed, when 
the writer of the schedule went on to state 
that she was at that moment suffering from 
an illness one of the manifestations of which 
was the inflammation of every particle of 
mucous membrane in her body, I felt, in the 
midst of my compassion, the sort of elation 
which comes from seeing the logical sequence 
of events carried out to its legitimate conclu- 
sion. Why should not her mucous membrane 
be inflamed, and all her microbes get out on 
the warpath ? It seems the only natural re- 
sult to be expected from the successful work- 
ing of an enriched grammar school course. 

II 

It may, perhaps, have been observed, in 
my exposition of the sufferings of the teacher 
in the preceding pages, that the authorities 
quoted have been mostly taken from my own 
sex, and if, when I go on to propose my long- 
meditated scheme for organizing a Society 
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Teachers, I 



74 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

assume that this society would be predomi- 
nantly female in its membership, which would 
presumably be largely recruited from the 
ranks of the teachers themselves, the reasons 
for such an assumption would not all be 
drawn from an offensive partisanship on my 
part. 

There are probably three times as many 
women as men engaged in teaching in the 
United States; moreover, so far as I have 
been able to observe, the men teachers have 
fewer wrongs that cry aloud for redress. The 
man who is a good disciplinarian, who can 
" govern a school," is practically his own man 
everywhere. He may be inexperienced, liable 
to mistakes, not wholly up to par in intellect- 
ual acquirements, but if he has that in him 
which enables him to control and stimulate 
pupils, the average school board does not 
greatly interfere with him. As for the reverse 
of the picture, the man who, as the phrase is, 
" has no government," the sooner he seeks some 
other avocation the better for all concerned. 
He was not born for school-teaching. With 
the woman teacher, however, the case is 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 75 

always and innately different. She may have 
taught for years, may fill her position admi- 
rably as one who is mistress of it, but she can 
never acquire so large a stock of knowledge, 
discretion, tact, or experience, but that a man, 
any man, because he is a man, can teach her 
something about her duties. 

In the smaller cities and towns the super- 
intendents of common schools and principals 
of high schools are very likely to be bright 
young fellows, who have just been graduated 
from college, and wish to fill these positions 
for a few years in order to lay up money for 
studying a profession. They come to their 
work fresh-hearted, filled with confidence and 
theories, and the woman teacher who has 
seen the same theories rise and flourish and 
decay under previous regimes is expected to 
greet each new appearance with perennial 
ardor, and manifest the same surprise when 
they disappear into the eternal framework of 
things. She no sooner accustoms herself to 
the amiable vagaries of one superintendent 
of schools than another and different sun 
rises on her horizon, and she is obliged to 



76 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

learn a new and varied style of genuflec- 
tions toward the east. Meanwhile, the school 
board, excellent men who frequently under- 
stand their own business much better than 
that of other people, are at perfect liberty, 
when they find a moment's leisure to attend 
to it, to move her about as if she were a 
pawn on a chessboard. 

During her official working hours the 
teacher is responsible for the health, man- 
ners, and morals, as well as the intellectual 
progress, of her pupils. She is equally at 
fault in regard to the bright ones who are 
kept back and the stupid ones who are not 
brought forward. On the days when rank is 
announced she is to expect to be greeted with 
tears and innuendoes on the part of those 
pupils who habitually expect rewards they 
have not worked for. All the loss of time 
and mental energy brought about by prac- 
tice in athletics, by dancing-schools, evening 
gayeties, and the like, lies, of course, at her 
door. As a rule, parents know that these 
things must be the teachers fault. When 
— after dismissing those victims who are un- 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 77 

justly kept after school — the teacher goes 
home at night, she is accompanied by les- 
sons to study, papers of different kinds to 
correct, work to lay out, and wasted tissues 
to renew. 

But does the teacher have no recreations ? 
Certainly, — her recreations are many, but 
not varied. Not infrequently the school su- 
perintendent has a hobby, in which case he 
forms classes in psychology, history, peda- 
gogy, or what not, and the teacher may find 
recreation by joining in these intellectual 
revels. If she does not join, it may be sus- 
pected that the root of the matter is not in 
her. There are teachers' meetings also, some- 
times for conference and for conveying in- 
formation of real benefit, and sometimes for 
the purpose of telling the teacher something 
she has heard before, or that she knows has 
no practical truth in it. If she is too weary 
to go out when her tasks are ended she may 
refresh herself at her home by reading edu- 
cational publications, for one or more of which 
she is recommended to subscribe. Almost 
every term there are teachers' institutes or 



78 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

conventions, where she can hear papers read 
all day, and attend a lecture in the evening. 
She would better not attend whist or dancing 
parties, lest she should be quoted as setting 
a bad example to her pupils, but she is at 
perfect liberty to " prepare a paper " for a 
woman's club, study American history with 
the Daughters of the Revolution, plunge into 
the wild dissipation of church socials, or join 
in the revels at a " pronunciation picnic," 
a form of entertainment which I have seen 
gravely recommended by authorities on edu- 
cational matters. 

In the summer, during the long vacation, 
there are summer schools. These begin in 
July, and continue through August. They 
are not compulsory, but it is a politic meas- 
ure for the woman teacher to attend one or 
more of them. Here she may meet other 
superintendents and other teachers, hear 
more papers read, and attend more lectures. 
Or she may join a Traveler's Club, provide 
herself with a bag and a hammer, and go to 
and fro over the earth, chipping off the face 
of nature, and taking in instruction at the 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 79 

pores. In short, she may do what she pleases, 
provided there are papers and lectures and 
tediousness connected with it, and provided 
she never, never, allows herself — or anybody 
else — to forget that she is a schoolma'am. 

There is a hue and cry raised some- 
times that the higher education for women 
diminishes the ratio of marriages. A large 
number of college-educated women become 
school-teachers because it is necessary for 
them to be self-supporting, and when they 
have once plunged into the vortex, opportu- 
nities for marriage must be either accidental 
or miraculous. The masculine superintend- 
ents and principals are usually men already 
married, or, if of callow years, they are apt 
to be "engaged" to some giddy girl whose 
knowledge of psychology has been mainly 
acquired by sitting under white umbrellas at 
the seashore, or on the stairs at evening 
parties. The young men who show them- 
selves at the summer schools either bring 
their wives with them, or appear for a brief 
period in order to " read a paper," or deliver 
a lecture on an abstruse subject, before retir- 



80 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

ing in good order to some spot where there 
is more fun and less wisdom. Occasionally 
it occurs to two educators to wed each other, 
but this is sometimes more objectionable than 
the marriage of cousins. 

When the society of which I have dreamed 
has been organized, it will involve the send- 
ing of female teachers during each vacation 
period to some frivolous place of resort where 
the labels will be taken off their backs, and 
they will be forbidden under penalty of law 
to listen to papers or lectures, to talk shop, 
or " take a course " in anything but hilarity. 
They will be encouraged to ride and row, 
play golf and tennis, to climb mountains 
for the fun of it, without making the least 
effort to find out what ingredients enter into 
the composition of the everlasting hills. 
They will also be allowed to dance, to talk 
with young men on subjects distinctly unin- 
structive, to sit on the sea sand, and ask no 
questions about what the wild waves are say- 
ing, and to wake in the night without utiliz- 
ing the time by repeating the multiplication 
table or giving the parts of speech. 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 81 

What effect this society will have remains 
to be seen, but I believe the experiment 
is worth trying. 

Ill 

When I had progressed thus far in my 
" Meditations " A came in, and I read to him 
what I had written. A is always a good 
target at which to fire one's mental ammuni- 
tion, because he is willing to comment, and 
has no scruple about saying disagreeable 
things if he considers that the occasion calls 
for them. 

" There is some French writer, — I Ve for- 
gotten which one," he began with his usual 
cheerful readiness when I had finished, — 
" who says there are three sexes, ' men, wo- 
men, and clergymen.' I see you divide them 
into men, women, and teachers." 

" On the contrary," I asserted, " I have 
taken especial pains to discriminate between 
the men and women teachers, and to call 
attention to the fact that * male and female 
created he them.' " 

" Oh, yes ; you 've discriminated as one 



82 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

discriminates between Methodist and Baptist, 
or as a man does if you ask him, ' What 's the 
difference ? ' and he answers, ' Oh, the differ- 
ence is the odds ! ' You say the male of the 
species is more independent than the female, 
and has a better time ; but, in general, you Ve 
lumped them together as a set of poor devils, 
just a little outside the pale of common 
humanity, who can never allow themselves 
to be moved by the sweet influences of the 
Pleiades, or feel their hearts leap up when 
they behold a rainbow in the sky without 
remarking, — 

" ' Thanks for the lesson of this spot ! ' " 

" I have tried to describe them," I answered 
with that immediate personal application of 
the subject for which my sex is noted, " as 
beings of like passions as ourselves, and 
doing a great deal more for the uplifting 
of society than you and I are ever likely to 
do. They would be overworked if they had 
only their own legitimate burdens to carry, 
but, in addition, we — you and I and the rest 
of the world — are always shoving off our re- 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 83 

sponsibilities on to them, and every educator 
who has a new theory is asking them to em- 
body it in their work." 

" Now, see here," A said comfortably ; 
"just remain calm! A woman always gets 
so excited over everything ! I had an idea 
that the modern school-teacher — and I '11 
call him a her since you seem to prefer it — 
had a good deal done for her. Aren't we 
building schoolhouses for her full of light 
and air, and ventilation and sanitation, and 
all the rest of it? Don't we give her school 
libraries, and pictures on the walls, and plants 
in the windows ? Are n't we talking now," he 
went on with a grin, " of letting her add 
menageries to the other attractions, — cats 
and dogs, and hencoops under the windows, 
and sheepfolds pretty soon, where the kids 
can observe the whole evolution of the Duch- 
ess Trousers, ' from the sheep to the man ' ? 
What more do you want ? " 

" I don't want any more; I want a good 
deal less. As a rule, every added ' attraction,' 
as you call it, means more work for the 
teacher." 



84 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 

"And you don't think you have overstated 
the case — just for the sake of making out a 
good story, you know ? " 

" I think," I affirmed, with just that degree 
of increased warmth which this question was 
intended to call forth, " that I have under- 
stated it. I have said nothing about the 
extra work at graduation and exhibition sea- 
sons, neither have I mentioned the subject 
of school fairs and debates, nor the parties 
and rides where the teacher is expected to 
officiate as 'guide, philosopher, and friend.' 
Why," — casting all moderation to the winds, 
and prepared to nail my colors to the mast, 
— " from the time a child first enters school 
until he departs from it, the teacher seems to 
be expected to do everything for him but put 
him to bed." 

" The teacher does sometimes hear him 
say his prayers," A remarked gravely. " I can 
testify to that." 

" This state of things is n't confined to 
any one place, either," I went on, plunging 
once more into unqualified assertion. " I 
have a friend who teaches in one of the Bos- 



EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 85 

ton schools, the last person in the world who 
would ever voluntarily be found marching 
in processions or engaging in hand-to-hand 
encounters with mobs. Yet on Dewey Day 
she spent hours in helping to marshal a host 
of schoolchildren through crowded streets, 
picking them from under the feet of tramp- 
ling hordes, and protecting them from utter 
destruction when they were overrun by mob 
violence." 

"Well, what then? Would you have had 
the poor little chaps all left at home ? That 's 
the way we teach 'em patriotism, — rub it in, 
you see." 

" Every one of those children," I said 
severely, " was legally entitled to two parents. 
There must be some use for parents in the 
everlasting economy of things, though many 
of them don't seem to suspect it. If the time 
ever comes when the enriched natural history 
courses demand that the pupil shall be sent 
into wild beasts' cages in order to observe 
their habits, it is the teacher who will be 
doomed to accompany him. And if during 
the visit the lion begins to lick his chaps 



86 MEDITATIONS 

and demand food, it is the teacher who will 
be expected to come cheerfully to the front 
and say, ' Eat me ! When I accepted my 
present munificent salary, I prepared myself, 
of course, not to falter at little sacrifices like 
this.' In the meantime the child will have 
retired in good order, and the parent — the 
female parent — will be safely at home em- 
broidering a doily, or writing a paper for the 
Woman's Club. What the male parent will 
be doing is one of the things ' no fellow could 
be expected to know ' ! " 

" What I admire about you," A said, with 
his hand upon the door knob, " is the restraint 
you put upon your imagination." He stepped 
outside, then reappeared for an instant to in- 
quire, " Well, what are you going to do about 
it ? " and with this Parthian shot he kindly 
closed the door, — kindly, because he was 
well aware that I did not know the answer to 
his question. 



IV 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

THERE is an old story, with which every- 
body is familiar, of a man who said that 
the proper way to construct a house was to 
build a piazza first and then tack the house 
on to it. That was not the way our piazza 
came into being. The house itself had been 
built many years before it became our house. 
When we entered into possession it was al- 
ready memory-haunted, full of delightful tra- 
ditional shadows which we have never wished 
to displace, although I do bethink me now 
of one bad quarter of an hour which was in- 
flicted on me by an estimable old lady, one of 
my earliest callers in the days of my young 
housekeeping. 

" My dear," she inquired placidly, " would 
it trouble you to know that somebody has 
died in every room in your house ? " 

I repeated this question to my husband, 
who at once took the sting out of it. 



9 o PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

" Well, what more do you want ? " he asked. 
" Don't you see that they have n't left us any 
room to die in ? " 

It was owing to this cheerful view of the 
matter that when we built the piazza, and so 
annexed a new joy, we made the ghosts as 
free of it as ourselves, and it is perhaps through 
their presence and influence that it became at 
once a place for dreaming dreams and seeing 
visions. 

It is, as to architecture, a Colonial-Grecian 
piazza. I know it is colonial because the man 
who designed it was especially bidden to 
make it so, and I am equally sure that it is 
Grecian because a college professor referred 
to it in an art lecture as a " Grecian portico." 

It is a long and wide piazza, with airy 
spaces and groups of slender columns ; and if 
it seems to my fancy both ampler and more 
romantic than it really is, it is because since 
it grew up into the world of piazzas it has 
taken in (in the mind of one woman at least) 
the whole material universe, — the green earth 
and blue vault of heaven, sun, moon, and 
stars, — and has added thereto the Garden of 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 91 

Eden, the Age of Pericles, all the stateliest 
features of our own colonial era, and some 
very satisfactory bits of the present century, 
with here and there a background borrowed 
from Chaos and Old Night. I hardly know 
what more one need ask of a mere sublunary 
nineteenth-century piazza ! I could give the 
actual dimensions, but I am not one of those 
commonplace beings who measure everything 
by feet and inches ; it is wider than a church 
door, and not so deep as a well, — that is, a 
very deep well, — and that suffices. 

On this piazza I have entertained many a 
wonderful guest. Indeed, at the very first, 
just after the art lecture in which the piazza 
began to masquerade as a Grecian portico, 
there came — on one of the fairest of summer 
mornings, I remember — a certain squat, 
snub-nosed, barefooted philosopher, whom I 
recognized at a glance. He was a man whose 
silver tongue had in the old days made many 
an Athenian youth forget the lapse of time, 
but I did not encourage him to speak, because 
I did not know whether it would be one of 
his good or bad days. He might, indeed, dis- 



92 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

course of immortality in language of serene 
and noble beauty, or he might spend hours on 
end splitting hairs. 

" Come, Parmenides," I seemed to hear him 
say, " let us go to the Ilissus, and sit down 
in some quiet spot, and discuss freely as to 
whether things begin at both ends, or in the 
middle, or upside down, or inside out. And 
if a part is equal to the whole, as we have 
sometimes argued that it might be, why is not 
a quarter of a dollar just as good as a whole 
one and a little better ? " 

And Parmenides might reply, even as of 
old,— 

" But if one is to remain one, it will not be 
a whole, and will not have parts." 

It is patent to the feeblest imagination that 
this sort of conversation, though it may be 
Greek, is not in the least colonial, and, there- 
fore, not suited to a Colonial-Grecian piazza ; 
but on that moonlight night when the young 
Alcibiades, wine-flushed, rose-wreathed, beau- 
tiful as a god, sat just where the great elm 
tree casts its moving shadow between the 
twin groups of slender pillars, the words 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 93 

which fell from his lips were neither Grecian 
nor colonial, but spoke the innermost lan- 
guage of the hearts of men in all times. What 
the message of Socrates could be when he 
chose, I learned from this imperishably beau- 
tiful young drunkard. 

" If I were not afraid that you would think 
me drunk I would have sworn as well as 
spoken to the influence which they [the words 
of Socrates] have always had and still have 
over me. For my heart leaps within me more 
than that of any Corybantian reveler, and my 
eyes rain tears when I hear them. . . . This 
man has often brought me to such a pass 
that I have felt that I could hardly endure the 
life which I am leading. . . . For he makes 
me confess that I ought not to live as I do, 
neglecting the wants of my own soul and 
busying myself with the concerns of the 
Athenians, therefore I hold my ears and tear 
myself away from him. He is the only person 
who ever made me feel ashamed, which you 
might think not to be in my nature, and there 
is no one else who does the same. . . . 

"For, although I forgot to mention this 



94 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

before, his words are ridiculous when you 
first hear them, — he clothes himself in lan- 
guage that is as the skin of the wanton 
satyr, — but he who pierces the mask, and 
sees what is within, will find that they are the 
only words that have a meaning in them, and 
also the most divine, abounding in fair ex- 
amples of virtues and of the largest discourse, 
or rather extending to the whole duty of a 
good and honorable man." 

I told the story of this vision to a real 
young man who sat on the piazza the next 
morning, — a nineteenth-century young man 
with all the modern improvements, — and I 
went on to remark to him — very reprehensi- 
bly, no doubt — that it would be a good thing 
for every young man to get drunk once if he 
could receive such an accession of divine com- 
mon sense in the process as Alcibiades seems 
to have done. 

He answered me soberly enough, looking 
vaguely at my daimon, which had just then 
lighted on the arm of his chair, " Oh, well ! 
I suppose there are times in every fellow's 
life when he hears the Voices — don't you ? " 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 95 

So I knew that the miracle performed for 
Alcibiades was not a solitary one. 

Socrates had a daimon, and so have I. I 
do not know whether the Grecian portico had 
anything to do with the appearance of my 
familiar, or if the fact of Socrates' possession 
bears any relation to my own. I know that 
his daimon was a divinity within his own 
breast, and that mine — differentiated per- 
haps by his semi-colonial environment — is 
an outward and visible devil's darning-needle. 
He is not a painted dragon-fly, but a long, 
angular, loose-jointed, interfering, meddle- 
some devil's darning-needle, and, so far as I 
have any reason to know, he was built simul- 
taneously with the piazza. At any rate, he 
appeared soon after we took possession of our 
new territory, and has reappeared there with 
each succeeding summer. 

I know nothing about the average length 
of days which is granted to creatures of his 
kind ; it matters not in his case, because he 
is a supernatural insect, one of the few, the 
immortal devil's darning-needles, who were 
not born to die. In the early days of his so- 



96 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

journ with us, I had an instinctive habit of 
jumping, whenever he came near in that 
swooping, waggle-tailed manner which char- 
acterizes his methods of approach, but the 
wisdom of the poet has been verified in this 
case as in many another, — I first endured, 
then pitied, then embraced. Gradually he 
became my guide, philosopher, and friend. 
He has taught me a good deal and I have 
taught him a good deal, and that means, as it 
generally does when such is the case, that 
first and last there has been an appreciable 
amount of disagreeableness between us. He 
is an insect of violent prejudices, and I can 
usually tell at once whether or not he approves 
of the callers who frequent the piazza. He 
has, I am sadly aware, two settled antipa- 
thies, — tramps and nervous women. 

How well I remember the first tramp who 
made my daimon's acquaintance ! He was a 
care-free, happy-go-lucky fellow, who had seen 
better days which he was contented to forget. 
With a deferential " Allow me," he sank into 
a piazza chair, removed his shabby hat, wiped 
the perspiration from his brow, and from that 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 97 

moment, despite the wildest efforts to dis- 
lodge him, the darning-needle sat like black 
care on the bald spot on that hobo's crown. 
I had not supposed that a professional wan- 
derer, used to living near to Nature's heart 
and resting his head upon the lap of earth, 
would have minded a trivial creature like a 
devil's darning-needle so much, but I confess 
that I have never personally been in a posi- 
tion to judge just how ticklish a thing a long 
and active insect nestling on one's bald spot 
can make itself. 

He paused — my hobo guest — in the 
midst of an eloquent and lucid exposition of 
the duty of every human being to help every 
other human being, passing good deeds on 
from one to another, apropos of the fact that 
the world, in my person, owed him a dinner, 
to remark suddenly and with violence, " Oh, 
the dev — il's darning-needle, I mean ! " And 
just at that moment his tormentor soared 
into the air and thus — apparently — pre- 
served himself from battle, murder, and sud- 
den death. When my visitor was about to 
go, after a square meal, eaten under cover 



98 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

and far from the haunts of harassing insects, 
I asked him, — 

" To whom are you going to pass this good 
deed on ? — if it is a good deed, of which I 
am not sure." 

He replied airily, " Oh, I may find a chance 
to help some other poor devil. But, madam, 
if I don't, it's all one. When I took to the 
road, I freed myself from all my previous re- 
sponsibilities." 

The darning-needle flew down and perched 
on the arm of my chair, and I said to him, 
as I watched the departing figure of the wan- 
derer, " I begin to wish I was a tramp my- 
self. My responsibilities are always hanging 
like a millstone around my neck. How abso- 
lutely delightful it would be to shed them all 
and be free ! " 

" Somebody," remarked my ungrateful dai- 
mon, " said on this very piazza the other day, 
1 The people who talk most about their re- 
sponsibilities are the ones who feel them 
least'" 

Since I have allowed myself to keep a dai- 
mon I know how politicians feel when the 



M 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 99 

newspapers begin to look up their records. 
I live constantly under the shadow of a here- 
after. Why, prithee, should a mere ignorant 
devil's darning-needle be continually hoisting 
me with my own petard ? Must I, forsooth, 
live up to all my smart sayings ? 

I never knew by just what underhand — 
or perhaps I should say underfoot — method 
my daimon insinuated himself into the pocket 
of the female book agent, the black and 
yawning pocket under her dress skirt wherein 
she carried the book which she intended to 
spring upon the unwary. 

This work, whose merits she was advo- 
cating to a needy world, was one of those 
compiled with the purpose of enabling the 
unlearned to appear wise without the trouble 
of being so, and as she restored the volume 
to its mysterious receptacle she remarked 
pleasantly to me, — 

" Of course you are aware, madam, that no 
matter what your other advantages may be, 
unless you are able to appear cultured you 
can never expect to enter the best society.' , 

It is a disheartening trying to know that 



•a*n 



ioo PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

one's lack of culture is such as to be appar- 
ent at a moment's glance to the meanest 
observer, and it was while I was watching 
with saddened vision the yawning pocket, 
into whose depths all my hopes of good 
society were disappearing, that my friend, the 
devil's darning-needle, flew suddenly forth 
and dashed himself against the prophetic 
forehead of Cassandra. At that moment, too, 
he and Cassandra rose simultaneously into 
the air and flapped their wings. 

When peace had been restored within our 
borders and I saw my daimon gleefully gy- 
rating to and fro in the sun, I said to him 
with some asperity, — 

" May I ask what that devil's dance is 
intended to indicate ? " 

" I am rejoicing," he answered, " because I 
am only a plain devil's darning-needle — " 

" Plain enough, if that is what you want," 
I interrupted maliciously. 

" I heard you telling somebody the other 
day that I was not so black as I had been 
painted. However, that 's neither here nor 
there; I was rejoicing that, as a mere insect 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 101 

without brains, I am not called upon to pre- 
tend to know what I don't know. I would 
rather be a sincere devil's darning-needle 
than a foolish virgin shining in the best so- 
ciety on the strength of borrowed oil." 

" You 're always giving thanks for doubtful 
mercies," I suggested spitefully. There is 
something so exasperating in the appearance 
of a devil's darning-needle putting on airs. 
" The other day you were jubilating because 
you had no soul, and yet, to the ordinary 
judgment, there is nothing so very enviable 
in the lot of a creature with neither mind 
nor soul." 

" I said," he remarked loftily, " and I stand 
to it, that if I were unfortunate enough to 
possess a soul I should have to spend my 
whole time ' saving ' it. As it is, I am at lib- 
erty to do something more useful." With 
the words he swung himself airily away, pass- 
ing with apparent heedlessness as he did so 
through the meshes of a cobweb in which 
a struggling fly had just been entangled, and 
restoring the poor insect to life and liberty. 

Generally speaking, my daimon does not 



102 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

put himself very strongly in evidence when 
I have callers of my own sex. He knows 
their tricks and their manners, their consti- 
tutional tendency to scream at the approach 
of a harmless insect, as if he were a midnight 
invader with a dark lantern instead of an in- 
nocent devil's darning-needle clad in his cus- 
tomary suit of solemn black. 

Frequently, however, I am grieved to know 
that he is perched on some point of vantage 
near by, looking at the weary countenance 
of my visitor, and listening while she explains 
that she has been waiting for weeks to snatch 
an opportunity to pay this call, but one duty 
follows another so rapidly in modern life that 
one never gets time to do what one most 
desires. 

" What are these duties that they all wear 
themselves out with ? " my officious daimon 
inquires when the caller has departed. " Why 
is every one of them afflicted with * that tired 
feeling ' ? Did n't you tell me that the wo- 
man who just went away had a small family 
and a comfortable income, and did n't ' do her 
own work,' as the phrase is ? " 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 103 

" Well," I explained, " when she does n't 
do her own work she does some other per- 
son's. They all do. There are the demands 
of housekeeping, the demands of the family, 
the social demands, entertainments to get up 
for the support of all kinds of benevolences, 
for the current expenses of the church — " 

"Then," this troublesome insect interrupted 
rudely, " the home is really an incubus and 
not a joy, and all the stuff I have heard you 
read aloud on this piazza about the larger 
life and conscientious giving is impractical 
nonsense. One really eats and drinks one's 
way into the kingdom of heaven at twenty- 
five or fifty cents a ticket, as the case may 
be. Do you suppose," he went on with in- 
creasing flippancy, " that when you get there, 
you will find the angels giving a pink tea for 
the support of the heavenly choir, or will it 
be only a musicale ' with local talent ' ? " 

" If you were a human being instead of an 
irresponsible devil's darning-needle," I assured 
him severely, " you would know that it is 
often a serious problem to decide whether it 
is best to adapt one's work to the world as it 



104 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

is, or the world as it should be. Ideal work 
belongs to an ideal world." 

This sentiment sounded well, and had a 
practical ring to it, so why should this irri- 
tating daimon go on to remark musingly, — 

" Of course one can hardly be expected to 
know the result of experiments which one 
has never tried ! " 

How can he be so sure that I have never 
essayed the ideal life ? And even if I have 
not, — which, of course is a libel, — how does 
it concern him ? If I were going to main- 
tain an embodied conscience, do you suppose 
I would paint it black ? 

I asked him this latter question. " Perhaps 
you would n't need to," quoth he. 

For an insect who professes such joy in 
the knowledge that he is soulless, my daimon 
displays a remarkable degree of interest in 
everything pertaining to theology. It was 
only his overweening curiosity on this sub- 
ject which induced him to linger around the 
piazza on the day when the Foolish Woman 
was talking with the Contrary Young Man. 
Ordinarily he would have disappeared at the 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 105 

first hint of the Foolish Woman's approach, 
but when I saw him perch on the window 
cornice and settle down without even a flip 
of the tail, I knew the topic of conversation 
must be one of those which command his 
serious attention. The Man of the World 
was there, too, I remember, sitting a little 
apart, alternately reading the newspaper and 
looking critically at the creases in his trou- 
sers. When the Man of the World indulges 
himself in any ethical theories, I feel sure that 
they have reference to the moral necessity of 
having one's trousers creased properly, and 
always wearing the right clothes at the right 
time of day. If the sun ever was darkened 
at noonday, — which the Man of the World 
does not in the least credit, — it was because 
some vandal had been paying a morning call 
with the wrong coat on, or dining at an hour 
when he should have just begun to think 
about lunch. On this occasion he was, ap- 
parently, paying no attention to the conver- 
sation between the Foolish Woman and the 
Contrary Young Man, which happened to be 
on the subject of amusements. His soul was 



106 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

like a star, and dwelt apart in a world where 
the thought of correct neckwear assumes its 
proper importance. 

" I am so glad," the Foolish Woman was 
saying with that pretty smile which is, accord- 
ing to Emerson, her excuse for being, " that 
nowadays nothing is wrong." 

The Contrary Young Man raised his eye- 
brows inquiringly ; it is one of the disagree- 
able ways he has. 

The Foolish Woman fell into a charming 
confusion, — and confusion punctuated with 
a dimple can be very charming. " Oh," she 
explained, " of course I did n't exactly mean 
that — that — nothing is wrong. I meant, 
don't you see, that I 'm so glad that every- 
thing is right. It 's so different, you know, 
from what it used to be when one had to give 
up all sorts of things if one was religious." 

" ' Renouncing the world, the flesh, and the 
devil,' they used to call it, I believe," the Con- 
trary Young Man suggested politely. 

The Foolish Woman pouted, — a pout is 
becoming to her. " Oh, well, you know well 
enough what I mean, only you want to be 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 107 

horrid, as usual. When I was a child people 
used to have all sorts of gloomy notions, about 
hell, you know, and endless damnation, — 
really, it seems like swearing just to talk 
about such things ! — and I used to be 
frightened to death when I was left alone a 
minute in the dark. I 'm sure I don't see how 
anybody can help feeling glad that they 've 
discovered a nice, cheerful religion instead of 
those frightful old creeds, and that we don't 
have to go moping round all the time think- 
ing about our souls. I should think," the 
speaker added virtuously, throwing grammar 
to the winds, " that every unselfish person 
would be glad that everybody 's going to 
heaven when they die." . 

" There used to be something said in the 
Good Book about excluding * dogs and 
sorcerers and — ' " 

The Foolish Woman raised her finger be- 
seechingly. " Please don't ! " she pleaded. " I 
think some of those quotations are just as 
improper as they can be." 

" I Ve wiped it off the slate," the Young 
Man assented cheerfully. " I just wanted to 



108 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

say, mum, if there 's nothing unspeakable 
about doing so, that I suppose under the 
present dispensation all those old categories 
have been called in." 

" Well, are n't you glad of it ? " the Foolish 
Woman inquired intelligently. " Do you want 
to go to the bad place ? " 

There was at this point a murmur, scarcely 
intelligible, from that part of the piazza where 
the Man of the World sat, still, to all intents 
and purposes, absorbed in the contemplation 
of his nether garments. " To the eye of vulgar 
Logic, what is man ? An omnivorous Biped 
that wears Breeches," — that is what one 
would have expected him to say. What he 
really did say — with a wink at the Contrary 
Young Man — was this, — 

" Is thy servant a dog, that you should ask 
him such questions ? " 

The Foolish Woman looked innocently 
puzzled. " I don't see what that 's got to do 
with it." 

11 Nothing at all," the Contrary Young 
Man assured her. " He was simply putting 
me in my own category. As for wanting to 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 109 

go to the bad place, I don't know that I am 
especially anxious for that privilege. What I 
do want, if anything, is the same freedom of 
choice in the matter that my forefathers had. 
I think there ought from the foundation 
of the world to have been some stability of 
arrangement about this business ; and after 
all the preceding generations have been al- 
lowed a degree of choice about their final 
destination, I call it a little rough on us, that 
all property qualifications, educational clauses, 
and civil service examinations should be abol- 
ished in our day, and we poor chaps just 
swooped into heaven without even having 
had the benefit of trial by jury." 

" I don't feel sure that I understand what 
you mean," the Foolish Woman remarked, 
with a reproving air, " but I 'm sure it sounds 
wicked. You can't possibly want all those 
awfully frightful old doctrines back, — fore- 
ordination, and free will, and those old things 
that nobody ever dreamed of understanding ? " 

" They're simple enough," the Young Man 
assured her, " if they are only presented in 
the right light. It's just like this; did you 



no PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

ever see a man fishing for pickerel ? Well, 
you know he baits his hook with a live min- 
now and throws him into the water. The 
little minnow seems to be swimming gayly 
about at his own free will, but just the mo- 
ment he attempts to move out of his appointed 
course, he begins to realize that there is a 
hook in his back. That 's just what we find 
out, you see, when we try to swim against the 
stream of destiny. We all have hooks in our 
backs. You can call it by whatever name 
you like, but that 's the whole business in a 
nutshell." 

" I won't listen to you another minute," 
the Foolish Woman protested, rising as she 
spoke. " You grow positively irreligious. 
Now there 's Mr. Blank, sitting there so 
quietly all the while. I 've no doubt he 's 
thinking of something really worth speak- 
ing of." 

" I am, indeed," the Man of the World said 
seriously. " I 'm thinking that I won't keep 
these trousers. This is the first time I 've had 
them on, don't you see, and the longer I look 
at them the more I think there 's something 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY in 

crude about the color. I don't see how a 
woman ever selects her clothes without going 
crazy. A man has certain definite rules which 
guide him to an extent, but a woman has to 
choose from such a wilderness of styles. My 
heart aches for you." 

" And well it may," the Foolish Woman 
was saying as the two walked away from the 
piazza together. " If it was n't an absolute 
duty to look as well as one can, I should 
simply give up the struggle. Sometimes, I 'm 
positively wild with it ! " 

The daimon flew down from his perch 
when the pair had disappeared, and lighted 
on the window sill beside which I sat. 

" It is entirely beyond my comprehension, 
— this attitude of you human creatures to- 
ward life ! " he exclaimed. 

" Yes ? " I said tentatively. 

" Either you are immortal beings," he went 
on, " or you are not." 

" Granted." 

" If you are not, nothing matters, and if 
you are, everything matters." 

" Exactly." 



ii2 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

" And instead of settling the question, or 
even thinking about it, it would seem, you 
go on discussing the color of your clothes 
and wondering what you would better have 
for dinner ! " Overcome by his emotions, with 
a tremendous swoop of the tail, the darning- 
needle wildly circled into the air. 

The Contrary Young Man drew his chair 
nearer to the open window where I was sitting. 

" Was it Mr. Weller who said that women 
were ' rum creeters' ? " he inquired. " I don't 
remember the authority, but I can vouch for 
the truth of the statement. If a woman must 
be a fool, though, it is just as well that she 
should be a pretty fool. I thought I heard 
you talking to somebody just now." 

" I thank you in the name of my sex for the 
complimentary tone of your remarks," I said, 
ignoring his last statement. " If it is the lady 
who has just gone away to whom you are so 
gracefully referring, I am not at all sure that 
she did n't appear quite as well as you did in 
the conversation which I overheard. I won- 
der sometimes in which religious denomina- 
tion you class yourself." 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 113 

" In no religious denomination at all ; I 
belong to the biggest denomination on earth, 
— the denomination of civilized heathen. 
We 're not all just alike, but we are all in the 
same fold. Some of us really want to know 
what we 're here for, and some of us don't 
care. Some of us are interested in our souls, 
and some in our trousers." 

" Speaking well of the absent does n't seem 
to be any part of your creed," I suggested at 
this point. 

The Young Man received this criticism 
cheerfully. " Good work ! " he commented. 
" I '11 tell you what church I would really like 
to join if I could do so with the same cheer- 
ful confidence in its efficacy which I have 
seen some of its members display. I took a 
spin into the country on my wheel the other 
day and stopped at a farmhouse at noon, as 
I often do, for a bowl of bread and milk. 
While I ate, the farmer gave me the benefit 
of his conversation, and he could talk the 
bark off a log. He was n't exactly my ideal 
of a perfect man, and the things in his life 
he seemed to be proudest of struck me as 



ii 4 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

rather shady transactions, but I found that 
he considered he had a sure thing as far as 
religion was concerned. He spoke of heaven 
as if he had paid for a corner lot. 

" ' You seem pretty sure about your stand- 
ing in the next world,' I said to him. 

" * Well, I don't know why not,' he said. 
' I was converted way back in '69.' 

" Now that is just what would suit me, — 
to get converted once and for all, and then 
stay so, no matter what little vagaries I 
might be betrayed into afterwards." 

"And yet, if I remember aright, I heard 
you a few minutes ago regretting that you 
were liable to be swooped into heaven, 
whether you wanted to or not." 

" You did," the Young Man acknowledged ; 
"but there are moments in a man's history 
when he realizes that it might make a differ- 
ence — in his own self-respect, at least — 
whether he entered the next world with a 
clean conscience or a dirty one." 

The daimon — who had, as usual, been 
listening — was all ready to put in his com- 
ment before the Young Man was fairly out 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 115 

of hearing. " There, but for the grace of 
God, goes this darning-needle ! " he ex- 
claimed, jerking his tail toward the visitor's 
departing form. "When I die, that is the 
end of me, but if I had been afflicted with a 
soul — " 

" ' To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,' " 
I quoted. " That does n't sound so tempting." 

" I shan't care how cold it is, so long as I 
don't know it. Might be more comfortable 
than a seat too near the fire ! " 

I left the piazza in disgust — a mere flip- 
pant devil's darning-needle, whom I could 
crush with one movement of my foot ! Why 
should I bear so much impertinence from him ? 

I was even more sadly impressed with the 
assurance of this mindless insect when he 
began to criticise man and his place in the 
universe. 

" I gather from what I have heard on this 
piazza," he remarked, with his usual thirst 
for information, " that man vaunts himself as 
belonging to the highest order of beings, the 
very top-notch, the flower of evolution and 
civilization and all the rest." 



n6 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

" Certainly," I answered coldly, with the 
air of one who inquires, " What affair is this 
of yours ? " 

" And it is because he alone, thus far, has 
developed moral faculties that he spends so 
much of his time in fighting with the vari- 
ous tribes of his order, each superior moral 
creature endeavoring to exterminate as many 
other superior moral creatures as possible ? 
When one member of the brute creation 
preys upon another, it is, as I understand it, 
simply the following out of a barbarous natu- 
ral instinct; when man preys upon his fel- 
low man it is, on the contrary, a revelation 
of supreme morality." 

" Many of the wars to which you allude 
have been wars of principle," I replied se- 
verely; " our Philippine campaign is a notable 
example of this. But one can hardly expect 
you to comprehend principles, since it is im- 
possible for you to possess them." 

" Much better not to have principles," the 
darning-needle commented pensively. " So 
far as my observation goes, it is almost in- 
variably the people with principles who get 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 117 

into mischief. Look at Russia, now. She 
could n't live another second without a Peace 
Congress, and all the time she was getting 
one of the biggest artnies on the globe ready 
for mobilization." 

" Certainly ; she wanted to be in a position 
to enforce her peace principles." 

" Oh," the darning-needle went on in a few 
minutes, "man 's a great creature ! He comes 
both to destroy and to fulfill, and he usually 
accomplishes his fulfillment by destroying. 
That story of the little boy which somebody 
told here the other day is a good illustration 
of the whole subject, it seems to me." 

Now the story of the little boy, which the 
darning-needle seized so maliciously with 
which to point his moral, was this : A gentle 
lady was trying to lead to higher things a 
dear little round-faced boy of hopelessly de- 
structive instincts, so she pointed out to him 
the great golden moon swimming through 
the summer heavens, and descanted to him 
on its beauty and the goodness of God in 
creating it to light the earth. The little van- 
dal listened unmoved to her most eloquent 



n8 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 

periods, and when she had finished an- 
nounced, — 

" I 'm goin' to bweak that down ! I 'm 
goin' to take my big tick and bweak that all 
down out o' the sky ! " A moment later, at- 
tacked by doubts of his own prowess, he 
added," If I can't bweak that down, I 'm goin' 
to get my faver to bweak it down for me ! " 

When I went into the house and slammed 
the door after me, it was not because I really 
desired to leave my daimon in the undis- 
turbed contemplation of man in his alleged 
favorite occupation of breaking down all the 
golden moons in the universe, but because 
I recognized the impossibility of explaining 
to an insect without reasoning powers that 
every great question contains within itself 
such possibilities of expansion that in follow- 
ing it to its bitter end sense frequently be- 
comes nonsense, immorality becomes moral- 
ity, and everything becomes everything else. 

It was the very morning after this annoy- 
ing conversation that the housemaid came to 
me. She had been cleansing the piazza floor, 
actively, as her manner is. 



PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 119 

" Honest to goodness, mum," she an- 
nounced, " I come jist within one o' troddin' 
on that ould dar'-needle you make sich a toime 
about. He don't very often be puttin' himself 
round under feet, but he 'd got a-thinkin' this 
mornin' so har-rd that he did n't wanst notice 
that I was in it — an' there he was, jist timptin' 
me to shtep on him. 'T would served him 
right, too — the ould divil ! " 

I asked myself whether I was most glad or 
sorry that my daimon had thus been preserved 
to me, and I did not know. Was I not hap- 
pier before I began to see myself so con- 
stantly as others see me ? Whether, I queried 
within myself, 't is nobler in the mind to suf- 
fer the slings and arrows of outrageous darn- 
ing-needles, or to take arms — or feet — 
against impertinent insects, and by opposing, 
end them ? 

Meanwhile, he is sitting on the arm of a 
piazza chair at this moment, winking his tail 
and inviting me to mortal combat. My spirit 
rises to the challenge. Come, 

Hang out our banners on the outward walls ! 



V 

THE BROWNING TONIC 



THE BROWNING TONIC 



THERE was once a time — not so long 
ago, either, as I would like to induce 
credulous people to believe — when the three 
editions of Robert Browning's poems which 
now find home and welcome in my book- 
cases would, had I possessed them, have been 
sealed books to me. 

In those days — already so inconceivable 
that they seem to recede into a prehistoric 
vista — it was commonly supposed by readers 
in my rank and station of enlightenment that 
a person who made any assured claim to a 
comprehension of Browning was either a rank 
pretender or the victim of a special revelation. 
It was during this period, I remember, that a 
teacher of English in the public schools said 
to me rather sadly, — 

" I don't like to tell people that I enjoy 



i2 4 THE BROWNING TONIC 

reading Browning — it makes me appear so 
conceited." 

Even in that dark era of my existence, 
however, I did not consider myself so igno- 
rant of the work of the great poet as my pre- 
sent confession seems to imply. I was more 
or less familiar with " The Pied Piper of 
Hamelin," I had heard the story of the good 
news that was brought from Ghent to Aix 
vigorously thundered forth on various decla- 
matory occasions, and I had read with emotion 
that " Incident of the French Camp " which 
Owen Wister makes his Virginian hero criti- 
cise so cruelly. I should not say, if I were 
going to state my conception of the situation, 
that I had been growing up through grada- 
tions of Longfellow, Lowell, Tennyson, and 
the rest to the possibility of a comprehension 
of Browning. The library with which I was 
most familiar in my youth offered to a child 
naturally hungry for poetry a noble collection 
of English authors. Fed from this source I 
devoured Shakespeare with the avidity which 
one saves nowadays for the perusal of a popu- 
lar novel, pored over " Paradise Lost " with the 



THE BROWNING TONIC 125 

conviction that it was rather sensational read- 
ing, laid my head upon the lap of earth with 
Gray, and spouted Collins's Odes to hill and 
sky in my lonely walks. 

This was princely fare, and I ought to have 
benefited by it far more than I did, yet, in 
spite of my limitations, I assimilated some- 
thing from it all, something that became a 
part of me, imperishable until I perish. From 
such a foundation, however ill profited by, 
one does not " grow up " to other authors, — 
one simply enlarges one's Olympian temple 
to make room for new gods, 

A hundred shapes of lucid stone ! 
All day we built its shrine for each. 

A man asked me once if I had not out- 
grown Dickens, and I questioned my inner 
consciousness to know if this were the case. 
Through long familiarity I had, indeed, 
ceased to read Dickens, but — outgrown ? 
Does one outgrow Mr. Micawber, Betsey 
Trotwood, Mr. Pickwick, and the rest ? Is it 
not rather that one enlarges the circle of one's 
friends to find room for them all, every one, 
the old no less than the new ? Sometimes, 



126 THE BROWNING TONIC 

too, the high gods prove too high, or the son 
of the carpenter is transformed before our 
eyes into the King of Men. 

Lucian's parable of the council of the gods 
and the struggle for precedence is applicable 
still. The dog-faced monster from Egypt 
with the great gold nose is, it is true, sooner 
or later relegated to the background when 
one learns to estimate comparative values, 
but he is not banished to outer darkness. All 
our gods come to stay — and a gold nose 
counts for something. 

I can remember the exact moment when 
Robert Browning was first definitely revealed 
to me as a presiding deity. 

I have always had a tendency to grasp at 
the pictorial aspect of things, and, as it 
chances, each of the group of poems which 
first revealed that poet to me as the friendliest 
friend of all is pigeon-holed in my mind with 
a spectacular tag attached to it. 

Thus I entered the Browning country, the 
real land of faery where Browning is king, 
through the gate of " Prospice," and the gate 
was opened to me by a young man. He stood, 



THE BROWNING TONIC 127 

I remember, while he read the poem aloud, 
and a slant of sunlight fell full upon his broad 
brows and his rather nice gray eyes, and even 
lent a glamour to the exceedingly pointed 
toes of his patent leather shoes. He liked 
what he read, and was in earnest about it ; he 
was not thinking of me, and I very soon 
ceased thinking of him. 

The peculiar movement of the poem ap- 
pealed directly to an element always easily 
aroused in my nature, — the fighting spirit, 
which may be in my case more bravado than 
pluck, but which at any rate knows how to 
appreciate pluck in others. 

I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more, 
The best and the last ! 

struck a chord that went thrilling on until the 
quick transition at the end of the poem, when 

the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, 

dwindle and blend and change, to become 

first a peace out of pain, 
Then a light, then thy breast, 
O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest ! 



128 THE BROWNING TONIC 

There is no touch to which the hearts of 
men and women so readily thrill with instant 
response as to this touch of human love, 
whether it be that of the fighter leaning 
across the black gulf of death to clasp the 
beloved one again, or the Blessed Damozel 
stooping from " the gold bar of heaven," to say, 

I wish that he were come to me, 
For he will come. 

Every one of us, even those who have de- 
liberately taken husbands or wives in a series, 
cherishes in his or her inmost thought the 
conviction that under different and more 
favorable circumstances we, too, might have 
been capable of romantic love and perfect 
constancy. This unformulated belief in our- 
selves aids our self-respect immensely, and 
helps to put a garland — invisible perhaps, 
but to the eye of faith none the less decora- 
tive — around the least sentimental existence. 

The motive of the whole poem, too, the 
courage, the constancy, the devotion, strikes 
with a bold hand — as Browning always does 
strike — that keynote of strength which is 
the dominant note in everything he writes. 



THE BROWNING TONIC 129 

Weakness is the only thing he conceived it 

possible to fear. Be bold, act a man's part 

and leave the rest, — above all, remember that 

fighting is the best fun in the world, and a 

man who won't fight is not worth his salt. 

Let a man contend to the uttermost 
For his life's set prize, be it what it will ! 

My next discovery in the Browning country 
was Rabbi Ben Ezra, a mine of pure gold 
from which I have been digging nuggets ever 
since. The personal recollection to which 
my earlier knowledge of this poem is joined 
is that of a clergyman with whom I conned 
it over stanza by stanza, for the purpose, as I 
recall it, of convincing him that Browning 
had written some things which compared 
favorably with the work of his favorite Tenny- 
son and were not materially harder to under- 
stand. 

I told him, with that modest confidence in 
my literary judgments which has always dis- 
tinguished me, that Tennyson never but once 
mustered sufficient courage really to "let 
himself go," and that Maud, which was the 
outcome of this first and last indulgence, has 



i 3 o THE BROWNING TONIC 

a hysteric note in it which would have been 
impossible to Browning. 

" One feels all the time," I criticised confi- 
dently, " that the 

dreadful hollow behind the little wood 

was a great deal more dreadful than it need 
have been if the hero of the poem could only 
have * braced up ' and fulfilled his own long- 

o ' And ah for a man to arise in me, 

That the man I arn may cease to be ! " 

My clerical friend, however, did not believe 
in any man's right to let himself go, and our 
sitting ended with a hopeless discrepancy be- 
tween the lay and the ministerial judgment. 

I have read this poem many times since 
then, and never without finding in it some- 
thing strong and stirring, something that gave 
me fresh courage to be gone 

Once more on my adventure brave and new. 

In many a night of weariness and racking 
pain I have repeated over and over to myself, 
that inner self that has power over the phys- 
ical being, fragments from its battle call,— 
the bugle call to my retreating courage : — 



THE BROWNING TONIC 131 

Then welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 
Be our joys three parts pain ! 
Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 
Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the 
throe ! 

It is true, I never did welcome each rebuff, 
and there was no moment, I suppose, when I 
would not joyfully have turned earth's rough- 
ness smooth, but since I must endure the throe 
whether I grudged it or not, here was some- 
thing to take hold of, to crystallize around, to 
serve as a sting to my spiritual weakness. 

If, of all our authors, we are most indebted 
to him who helps us to hate cowardice, then 
Robert Browning must be hailed above all 
others as the prophet of courage, — courage 
in victory, courage in defeat, the courage of 
the losing fight no less than the courage of 
success. One, he was, 

who never turned his back, but marched breast 
forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would 
triumph, 



i 3 2 THE BROWNING TONIC 

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 

I have never asked, it is true, whether in 
detail he lived up to what he preached. It 
does not matter. Most of us are in one 
way or another born cowards, and what we 
need more than anything else is to be made 
properly ashamed of ourselves. Hail, then, 
Robert Browning, disturber of the peace ! 

While I was still in the grasp of Rabbi 
Ben Ezra, I was invited to spend an after- 
noon with a " Reading Circle," which was at 
that time struggling with the dark mysteries 
of " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." 

They told me sadly — the members of the 
Circle — that they had pored over a dozen 
interpretations of the poem and " did n't un- 
derstand it yet." 

" Of course I would like to understand 
what Browning meant by the thing," one 
reader said candidly, — " that is, if he himself 
had any idea ' where he was at,' — but I don't 
see how anybody could like it." 

Having had my attention thus called to 
Childe Roland, I made a bold charge at his 



THE BROWNING TONIC 133 

secrets, but very soon made up my mind that 
I was not under the slightest obligation to 
understand him. I have trodden that dark 
way with him many a time, have lost myself 
upon the barren plain, felt what he felt, 
looked with despairing eyes on what he saw, 
and when 

Burningly it came on me all at once 
This was the place, 

I have always been sure that, after going 
through so much disagreeableness for the 
sake of arriving at the Dark Tower, only to 
find " all the lost adventurers, my peers," on 
dress parade watching to see what I was 
going to do about it, I should have blown 
the horn at all hazards. As I have previously 
hinted, Browning's chief virtue is that he 
makes one feel willing to blow horns and 
wave banners and lead forlorn hopes. 

It was at about this period of my Brown- 
ing explorations that I began to meet the 
Greek professor in my morning walks. The 
springtime had come and the voice of the 
turtle was heard in the land, — a condition 
of affairs which made it more possible for 



134 THE BROWNING TONIC 

the human voice to gain an audience. The 
Greek professor — who had retired from the 
active duties of his position — now and then 
joined company with me during our leisurely 
return from the morning errands which gave 
us an excuse for being abroad. He had a 
genuine passion for the classics, and enjoyed 
rolling out sonorous quotations from his favor- 
ite authors, although these gems of thought 
always required translation into English for 
the instruction of my ignorance. 

One day he asked me rather mournfully 
if I liked Browning. I acknowledged with 
cheerful hope that I thought I was going to 
like him, though I had not yet penetrated 
very far into the labyrinth of his pages. 

It appeared from the professor's narrative 
that an enthusiastic young friend " who in the 
inexperience of youth doubtless flattered him- 
self that he could comprehend all mysteries " 
had requested him, the professor, to read 
" Caliban upon Setebos " — oh, the drawling 
scorn of accent with which this was spoken ! 
and he was in process of offering this sacri- 
fice to friendship. 



THE BROWNING TONIC 135 

" If you have n't read the gibberish," he sug- 
gested, " and have time to waste, — as most 
women do have, — I wish you would see 
whether you can make head or tail of it. I 
can't." 

The next time we met I told the professor 
that I had ventured on Caliban and rather 
enjoyed the experiment. I spoke more dif- 
fidently than is my wont. I am generally 
most positive in regard to subjects I know 
least about. 

" Enjoyed it ! " the professor exclaimed. 
" Will you tell me what there is to enjoy about 
* Caliban upon Setebos ' ? " — the old scornful 
intonation. 

" Well," I replied, " the same element that 
appeals to me in all the Browning poems I 
know, — the daring of it, the boldness with 
which he puts his finger on the sore spots so 
many of us are conscious of and think it 
wicked to mention." 

" Pooh ! " my friend repeated, " ' Caliban 
upon Setebos ' ! My dear woman, there 's no- 
thing in it — less than nothing ! Now here 's 
a little bit that I got from my Greek Calen- 



136 THE BROWNING TONIC 

dar this morning — an epitaph by Leonidas. 
See what you think of this," and the profes- 
sor translated for me : — 

A slave was Epictetus, who before you buried lies, 
And a cripple and a beggar and the favorite of the skies. 

" I like it," I answered, " partly, I think, 
because it shows the same spirit that draws 
me toward Browning. 

" The only difference I recognize between 
the two," the professor remarked in his very 
softest drawl, " is the difference between words 
with meaning — much in little — and words 
without meaning — little in much." 

I no longer meet the professor in my morn- 
ing walks. He heard one day " the great 
voice " from those skies 

Where Zeus upon the purple waits, 

and calling last Ave atque Vale ! to those he 
left behind, he went his way. It may be 
that in that high Olympus he talks to-day 
with " Euripides the human " and Catullus 
the beloved and Browning the brave, and 
there has learned to know as he is known. 
From " Caliban upon Setebos " I passed by 



THE BROWNING TONIC 137 

an easy transition to " Paracelsus." This trans- 
formation scene was owing to the prophetic 
guidance of the Woman's Literary Club. 
The " programme committee " of this organi- 
zation, knowing well where Genius had her 
home, had invited me to " prepare a paper " 
on the latter poem. I did not hesitate for a 
moment. I had once glanced hastily through 
the poem, and, being hampered by very little 
knowledge of its real import, in three days 
from the time of request I had delivered my- 
self of an interpretation which solved sat- 
isfactorily — to my thinking — every vexed 
problem that the critics had ever raised in re- 
gard to its meaning. 

I did not hesitate to assert in the most 
" flat-footed " manner, " Whatever charge of 
obscurity can be brought against other of 
Browning's poems, there is nothing obscure 
in * Paracelsus ' ! " 

It was a great paper. I liked the exordium 
of it : — 

" It is characteristic of the power and the 
outreach of Browning's genius that it almost 
seemed as if he had nothing to learn from 



138 THE BROWNING TONIC 

life. In * Paracelsus,' written by a stripling 
hardly past the age of boyhood, a young man 
standing at the threshold of his years, joyous 
with an Italian affluence of temperament, hav- 
ing never known the deep experiences, the 
struggles that are birth pangs of the soul, 
the disenchantments and failures of life, he 
paints the dream, the yearning, the bitter 
comedy, and the tragedy of the human drama 
as if his genius could foresee the end from the 
beginning, or as if he had already reached the 
vantage point of that 

" Last of life for which the first was made." 

I am not much addicted to reading papers 
in public, — I think, in fact, that I made my 
debut and my final exit in that capacity on 
the occasion in question, — and I remember 
well that the electric light above my head 
shone with unexampled violence, and the 
faces of the audience advanced and receded 
like the waves of the sea. There were tones 
in my voice, too, which were unrecognizable 
even to myself. When I had finished, a lady, 
who was then serving God and her native 



THE BROWNING TONIC 139 

land by accepting the position of domestic in 
some needy household, took me kindly by 
the hand and told me that she liked my 
piece. Few of my audience seemed to real- 
ize that they were apathetically letting the 
opportunity of a lifetime slip by. 

I have never been sorry for my audacity in 
writing that paper. I got from it for myself 
much that I did not know how to give to 
others, — the burden and message of Para- 
celsus, that strange, complex nature, trying 
at all the gates of life, striving to live a purely 
spiritual existence in a human world, forced 
to recognize one by one the physical and 
material barriers which made such a life 
impossible, hampered by the very strength 
of his own powers, and stooping at last to 
be bound by the restraints he despised, yet 
through strength and weakness alike, 

upward tending all, though weak, 
Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, 
But dream of him, and guess where he may be, 
And do their best to climb and get to him. 

It is the same dominant chord of courage. 
All the battle-cries of all the ages are in it, 



i 4 o THE BROWNING TONIC 

and the confidence born of all the victories 
that have been. 

A Browning notion of victory, however, 
does not with any necessity whatever imply 
the getting what one wants. It often means 
just keeping eternally at it, and realizing that 
surrender is the only defeat : — 

But what if I fail of my purpose here ? 
It is but to keep the nerves at strain, 
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, 
And baffled, get up and begin again — 
So the chase takes up one's life, that 's all. 

II 

I am as well aware as any one can be that 
my Browning explorations are valuable to the 
world at large only as an indication of the 
ease with which one can grow rich. As Cap- 
tain Bunsby would say, "The bearings of 
this obserwation lies in the application on it." 

If I who am but a woman, neither scholar 
nor critic, a shallow adventuress going at the 
quest in mere haphazard fashion, have been 
able to discover for myself the true elixir, the 
tonic which the twentieth century most needs, 



THE BROWNING TONIC 141 

what wealth may not lie in the search for that 
dominant sex which habitually calls itself 
" the stronger," the sex of assured intellect 
and logical mind, and, to speak candidly, the 
sex that needs the tonic most. 

I may be wrong, — and if so I am willing to 
acknowledge it to anybody who can convince 
me of my error, — but my observation goes 
to show that the average woman of to-day 
has more ideals than the average man, and 
is therefore morally stronger. Moreover, no 
woman is ever allowed to suppose herself in- 
capable of improvement. We belong to a sex 
that is continually being lessoned and lec- 
tured,. One never takes up a newspaper with- 
out finding in it some admonition in regard 
to what women should or should not do. On 
the other hand, while our daily reading fur- 
nishes much inconsistent criticism of indi- 
vidual men, the evidence seems to point to 
the fact that men in the concrete are very 
well satisfied with themselves as they are. 
One cannot help feeling that if the entire sex 
could be lined up, and the question pro- 
pounded to them, " What 's the matter with 



i 4 2 THE BROWNING TONIC 

man ? M the answer would be one universal 
roar of " He 's all right ! " 

A woman, once convinced that she has a 
soul, can seldom be quite easy in ignoring it ; 
a man feels sure that if he has one it is not his 
fault, and therefore he feels himself relieved 
from too great responsibility. The twentieth- 
century man, however, is not indolent in any 
sense but an ethical one. Never was there 
a time when more attention was paid to phys- 
ical growth and culture, but a tonic whose 
efficacy must be assured by a more strenuous 
spiritual life does not especially commend itself 
to our athlete. He prefers ease of mind and 
malt extracts. He has " outworn " the old 
dogmas, seen the folly of ideals, and prefers 
to confine his attention to the things that 
really count. If there is another existence to 
follow this one, its philosophy is simple : — 

Our egress from the world 
Will be nobody knows where, 
But if we do well here 
We shall do well there, — 

therefore, why bother one's self too much 
about a future which is, at best, problematic ? 



THE BROWNING TONIC 143 

The human race has not altogether dete- 
riorated. The twentieth-century man has in 
him all the heroic possibilities that any man 
ever had, but he is suffering from that weak- 
ening of fibre which necessarily accompanies 
a dearth of convictions. 

The acquisition of wealth, which is the 
ruling motive of the America of our century, 
does not constitute an ideal, since an ideal 
implies some sort of moral earnestness. Ma- 
terialism, however, is perfectly consistent 
with great benevolences, generosity without 
sacrifice and sympathy without abnegation. 
Indeed, in proportion as we lower the stand- 
ard of that absolute strength which consti- 
tutes perfect manhood and womanhood, the 
more " kind-hearted " we grow, the more we 
deprecate anything which creates pain or de- 
mands endurance, the more we send flowers 
to criminals and sign petitions against the 
execution of murderers. We cry out against 
war and send delegates to Peace Congresses, 
not altogether because this course is " Chris- 
tian," — though that is how we usually define 
our feeling, — but partly, too, because, like 



i 4 4 THE BROWNING TONIC 

the child in " Helen's Babies," we object to the 
sight of anything " bluggy." 

I do not know anything which better illus- 
trates the deterioration of fibre which is the 
result of an unstrenuous standard than the 
attitude of the American people — too large 
a proportion of them, at least — toward the 
Cuban war. 

I was too young at the time of our civil 
conflict to pronounce with any accuracy upon 
the feeling of the public at large in regard to 
it, so perhaps I am wrong in imagining, as I 
always have done, that it was that of heroic 
acceptance and endurance, and that men and 
women alike felt that the best blood of a na- 
tion was not too great a price to pay to settle 
a moral issue forever and settle it aright. 

Years after, when the bugles of war again 
sounded for a contest not our own, — a war 
of generosity to right the wrongs of another 
and alien people, — the response was just as 
ready, the deeds of heroism were no less con- 
spicuous, and for a breathing space while the 
men of the country were shouting, " Remem- 
ber the Maine ! " and the women were gath- 



THE BROWNING TONIC 145 

ering in sewing circles for the manufacture 
of the flannel night clothing which no self- 
respecting soldier ever fails to assume before 
retiring to rest in the trenches, a thrill of the 
same unquestioning courage swept through 
the land. 

Scarcely had the echo of the guns of San- 
tiago died away, however, before the howl 
began, — the howl of the kind-hearted, the 
sympathetic, the unstrenuous generation. 

What justification, they asked, has any 
Christian nation for going to war at all, es- 
pecially in a quarrel not its own ? 

If, however, to suit his own purposes, Pres- 
ident McKinley insisted upon war, why did 
he not select a country possessing a more 
temperate climate as the scene of battle ? 

If time had been given the soldiers to pro- 
vide themselves with suitable outfits, could 
not this delay have been utilized by the gov- 
ernment for the manufacture of sandwiches 
in readiness for informal lunches to be served 
during charges and on the field of battle ? 
Has not a toiling and much enduring sol- 
dier a right to expect such common, every-day 



i 4 6 THE BROWNING TONIC 

recognition of his services as a hot dinner, 
prepared promptly, would represent ? Is the 
" poor soldier " asking too much when he calls 
for clean linen and an opportunity to run up 
a laundry bill ? 

In short, the voice of the people suggested 
wisely, if we must have war, let us see that 
it is conducted regularly and in order, with- 
out bloodshed or confusion. Let physicians 
be provided to feel the military pulse daily 
and keep down all unnecessary fever in the 
veins. 

Hence it happened that while we were 
taking all our newly acquired heroes down 
from their pedestals, and our army officers 
were quarreling over the division of glory, 
and mothers of volunteers were writing to 
the newspapers to complain that the tastes 
of their sons had never been consulted in re- 
gard to having oatmeal for breakfast, and com- 
mittees of investigation were diligently smell- 
ing at all the army stores that remained 
unused, there were one or two more or less 
important facts that seemed to escape general 
cognizance. 



THE BROWNING TONIC 147 

It has, for instance, sometimes been appre- 
hended that war is a grim game, not suited 
to holiday soldiers ; but if the thing at stake 
is worth the price to be paid, the only decency 
is to pay it joyfully without doubt or hesita- 
tion, and having paid, never to repent. Re- 
pentance, in such a case, is cowardice. 

I remember a certain little boy who came 
home from school with a black eye and a 
bleeding nose and a question in his young 
mind whether he should weep or swagger. 
Just as his mother's sympathy and first aid 
to the wounded were beginning to convulse 
his infant features his father appeared on the 
scene. 

" Did you have any good reason for fight- 
ing ? " he asked. 

The budding warrior proclaimed a noble 
cause for battle. 

" Did you lick the other fellow ? " 

The other fellow had ignominiously bitten 
the dust. 

" Then," inquired the parent, " what are 
you whining over ? " 

Every grave on those Cuban hillsides marks 



148 THE BROWNING TONIC 

a sacrifice for human progress, and when one 
remembers the failures, the futilities, the dis- 
graces among living men, who can feel that 
he who in the moment of a supreme impulse 
offered all, and found his abnegation accepted, 
did not choose the better part ? 

Life's business being just the terrible choice 

betwixt strength and weakness. 

It is a part of the materialism of modern 
life and the cowardly theory that life is worth 
to a man only " what he gets out of it as he 
goes along," that so many men spend their 
days in offering continual sacrifices to their 
bodies. 

When the hero of the popular short story 
is not eating or drinking, he is smoking. His 
chronicler flavors his pages with tobacco 
smoke and punctuates them with cocktails. 
In joy or sorrow, in the most romantic no 
less than the most commonplace moments, 
the hero " lights another cigarette." Emotion 
unaccompanied by nicotine is something of 
which he evidently has no conception. 

It is the same, too, with the up-to-date 



THE BROWNING TONIC 149 

young man in real life. He knows, if he has 
been properly trained, that while a toothpick 
should be indulged in only in that spot to 
which Scripture enjoins us to retire when we 
are about to pray, a meerschaum pipe is a 
perfectly well-bred article for public wear, and 
one which enables him to fulfill agreeably that 
law of his being which suggests that he should 
always be putting something in his mouth. 

At a college ball game not long since where, 
as is usual on such occasions, clouds of incense 
were rising to the heavens from the male por- 
tion of the spectators, I amused myself by 
observing a young man who sat in a carriage 
near me, and who while the game was in 
progress smoked a pipe three times and filled 
in all the intervals with cigars and cigarettes. 
I knew something about him, and had fre- 
quently heard him referred to as " a first-rate 
fellow," but if anybody had asked him if he 
believed himself capable of a single pure 
impulse of the soul entirely unmixed with 
bodily sensations, he would have stared in 
amazement. 

Rabbi Ben Ezra's test, 



150 THE BROWNING TONIC 

Thy body at its best, 
How far can that project thy soul on its lone way ? 

would have struck this young man as a de- 
cidedly " fresh " inquiry. A certain pictorial 
advertisement which for a long time held a 
conspicuous place in the daily newspapers 
would, however, have appealed to him at once. 
It depicted a youth with a pipe in his mouth, 
holding his sweetheart on his knee, and rap- 
turously exclaiming as he diligently puffed 
the smoke into her face, " With you and a 
pipeful of Every Day Smoke I am perfectly 
happy ! " Old Omar gives us a more poetic 
version of the same thing : — 

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou 
Beside me singing in the Wilderness — 
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow ! 

I am not desirous in this essay of discuss- 
ing the morality of any habit, as such ; I 
simply wish to emphasize the fact that con- 
stant self-indulgence of any kind is incom- 
patible with strength. The Browning tonic 
which I would like to substitute for the pro- 
prietary medicines of the age does not inspire 
any man to be an angel before his time, — 



THE BROWNING TONIC 151 

it only stimulates him to be a man and 
master of himself : — 

A man for aye removed 
From the developed brute ; a God though in the germ. 

The tonic in question is not an expensive 
remedy except in the amount of effort re- 
quired on the part of the patient to render it 
efficacious, but it is perhaps a little too bracing 
to be taken in large doses until the spirit of 
it has begun to steal into one's veins. 

If, for instance, the young man of the ball 
game should begin before breakfast in the 
morning with 

What have I on earth to do 

With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly ? 

follow it up at about the time of his after' 
breakfast pipe with 

I count life just a stuff, 
To try the soul's strength on, 

manfully swallow an afternoon dose of 

When the fight begins within himself 
A man 's worth something, 

and substitute for his usual nightcap, 



152 THE BROWNING TONIC 

Why comes temptation but for man to meet, 
And master and make crouch beneath his foot, 
And so be pedestaled in triumph ? 

he might at first find such a sudden influx 
of red blood into his veins a little more than 
his system could bear, but, in due time, if 
the prescription were persevered in, he might 
learn to welcome the joy and the strength of 
the new elixir of life. 

" Don't you get a little weary of hearing 
life compared to a battle-field ? " the athletic 
young man inquired when the rhetoric of 
these prescriptions was discussed in the 
family circle. 

" Call it a football field, then," I retorted. 
" If you are going to play at all, one has a 
perfect right to expect you to get into the 
game." 



VI 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 



WHY don't you read ? " the hero of a 
recent novel inquires of the heroine, 
who is supposed to be a creature of de- 
light. 

u Read? I hate it!" she cries. "Why 
should I wade through pages of poetry about 
nature when I can look out of the window 
here ? Why waste time on some poet's im- 
pression of a storm when nearly any week 
in summer I can stand there and watch the 
swish of the rain along the mountains ? " 

The novel in question is one of those — 
somewhat rare in modern annals — whose 
gentle flow of narrative makes it possible for 
the reader to pause and consider the status of 
a heroine who, loving nature and loathing 
books, is able to look upon the world around 
her with something of the primal emotion 



156 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

which our Mother Eve must have felt when 
she saw the " pleasant soil " of Paradise stretch 
green before her wandering eyes, a paradise 
rich in hope, but untouched by memory ; the 
emotion which Wordsworth describes as 

a feeling and a love 
That had no need of a remoter charm 
By thought supplied, nor any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye. 

I am no heroine, though I would dearly like 
to be one, and I knew as I mused upon my 
sister of the novel that I should never be able 
to imitate her self-sufficiency. All my world 
of nature is underlaid and permeated by my 
world of books ; all my world of books is 
sweet with vernal breezes and interfused with 
that something, 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air 
And the blue sky. 

It is strange by what process of selection — 
or election — we choose the scenes and mem- 
ories that shall stay with us, round which 

with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, 
Our pastime and our happiness will grow. 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 157 

Almost invariably in my life when some 
epoch-marking book or poem has risen like a 
new star above my soul's horizon, it has shone 
forth for me against the background of the 
visible heavens. From childhood to woman- 
hood none of the libraries I have loved best 
have ever been bounded arbitrarily by four 
walls. They have been places where the 
morning sunlight brought a double vision, 
where the world without mingled itself indis- 
tinguishably with the world within ; above 
them one mighty arch of sky domed itself 
over all the continents, and their windows 
looked alike into the Gardens of Solomon 
and the Forest of Arden, New England and 
Arcady. 

II 

The library where I wandered at will in 
my girlhood days boasted of no costly edi- 
tions. Most of its standard books had been 
collected in the early manhood of a struggling 
young student who loved books and gleaned 
them where they were most easily accessible. 
There were many small volumes printed, not 



158 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

later than 1828 or 1829, on yellow-edged 
paper, with pasteboard covers also of a yellow- 
ish tint. These had been re-covered, for pur- 
poses of preservation, with strong, coarse gray 
paper, on whose durability time has made 
little impression. 

They were convenient in size, light to the 
hand, and I loved them so well that no other 
form or binding has ever seemed to me 
equally desirable. 

It was a west room where the bookcases 
stood, and from its windows one saw the 
green Hallowell hills climbing upward toward 
the setting sun. There, in the old bookcases, 
they are still, that flock of gray books, like a 
flight of doves, each bringing its olive branch 
of greenness and beauty from the teeming 
world outside. 

My father was a man who had decided 
ideas about the sort of reading which should 
be permitted to his children, ideas which in 
those bygone years of girlhood often con- 
flicted unpleasantly with my own. Now I 
wish that there were more such wisely obdu- 
rate parents. There was a circulating library 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 159 

in my native town, and from time to time 
books were added to it which obtained great 
popularity among my schoolmates. Once, I 
remember, it was " The Barclays of Boston," 
by Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, that was being 
passed from one to another and pronounced 
" perfectly elegant." 

When I pleaded to be allowed to read it 
my mother broke through her usual rule of 
non-interference to suggest to my father that 
there was at least no harm in the book. 

" It is nothing but wishwash," that stern 
critic declared, "and the people who read 
wishwash think wishwash." 

It was a golden Saturday afternoon in early 
summer; no Saturday afternoons in these 
latter days can be quite so fair as the old 
ones. There was no school, and though I 
might not be permitted the joy of acquaint- 
ance with "The Barclays of Boston," at least 
the hours were all my own to use at my will. 
Even one who feels herself the victim of an 
untoward fate need not go mourning all her 
days. 

I knew on just what shelf they had their 



160 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

home, the four little volumes that had often 
tempted me. I stood before the bookcase, 
shut my eyes, and chose. It is so hard to tell 
of deliberate will just what one does desire. 
The fates decided in favor of " The Anti- 
quary," and, volume one in my hand, I sought 
the old-fashioned garden below the house. 

The " August apple tree " spread out its 
lower branches into a seat made for readers 
and dreamers ; it stood close beside the brook 
that in springtime was a rushing torrent and 
the rest of the year a slender stream with a 
liquid gurgle in its note. I knew that brook 
in its remotest windings ; three gardens back 
it flowed through the neglected pleasure 
grounds of what had once been a well-kept 
estate. Those terraced lawns where weeds 
tangled with gay flowers in the untended 
beds, the dark circle of trees among which a 
moss-grown fountain played, had for me all 
the charm of an Italian garden, and the brook 
came to me with a fresh delight for having 
lingered through that spot of romance. Just 
beyond our boundary fence, where a little fall 
of water formed a pool, two bombshells that 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 161 

had been brought from Key West by an old 
sea captain in the time of the civil war had 
found a permanent resting-place. They were 
not likely to explode after so many years of 
thorough soaking, yet there was always the 
fearful joy of dreaming that they might. 

Beside this beloved brook, which had in 
its day served every purpose to which the 
imagination of childhood could bend it, I 
perched myself in the old apple tree, opened 
my book, and in the twinkling of an eye was 
off and away over the Scottish Border. Here 
for the first time I encountered the Magician 
of the North, to me a magician indeed, and 
the gateway to that land of burns and braes 
has always in my dreams opened out of the 
old childhood garden of the singing brook. 
Edie Ochiltree's blue gown haunts its waters 
still, the ancient manor house of Knockwin- 
nock finds a setting among my neighbors 
neglected terraces, and I know the gloomy 
hollow where of old dwelt Elspeth of the 
Craigburnfoot. Recent statistics claim to 
show that at least 100,000 volumes of Walter 
Scott's works will be sold during the current 



i6 2 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

year. I wish every one of those volumes 
might be read with as much joy to the reader 
as they have given and still give to me. 

Beside my desk, as I write, lies a spray of 
purple heather, crushed and dry, yet purple 
still. It came to me not long ago from that 

Land of brown heath and shaggy wood 
Land of the mountain and the flood, 

which my bodily eyes have never seen. But 
for books that faded blossom would have little 
significance for me ; by the aid of books it be- 
comes a thing of magic : — 

Though crushed its purple blossoms, 

Its tender stems turned brown, 

It brings romantic Highlands 

Into prosaic town ; 

The clans are on the border, 

The chiefs are in the fray, 

We 're keen upon their footsteps 

With Walter Scott to-day. 

Above that heather-decked moorland they 

sing, the warbling birds that " break the heart " 

because they 

'mind us o' departed joys, 
Departed never to return ; 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 163 

the air is astir with the echo of immortal 
ballads that thrill the pulses still, the cry of 
loyal hearts to the king over the water. 

Wha '11 be king but Charlie ? 
they ask, and the wide moorland calls back, — 

Follow thee, follow thee, wha would na' follow thee, 
King o' the Highland hearts, bonny Prince Charlie ! 

There bonny Kilmeny wanders with the 
Flower of Yarrow, and David Balfour finds 
Catriona and the Little Minister ; there, too, 
the beloved wraith of him who, exiled from 
the land he loved, dreamed of Scotland, and 
longed for her, and wrote of her, comes from 
his tropic mountain grave to tread the heather 
at last. 

Ill 

There is an old-fashioned New England 
farmhouse which I used to know well, an un- 
painted cottage now seldom inhabited, sitting 
in a green meadow, and staring at the high- 
road which it fronts through wide, many- 
paned windows. 

At the back of the house a deep lane bor- 



i6 4 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

dered with gnarled old apple trees leads to 
the pasture half a mile away. A stream runs 
through the pasture, so wide that one must 
spring from stepping-stone to stepping-stone 
in order to cross. A few paces farther on one 
finds the grove and knows it at once for a 
place of enchantment. 

There is no undergrowth in that grove; 
only vernal and mossy sward where the lichen 
and the sundew and the tiny yellow oxalis 
weave their embroideries. All the trees are 
tall and stately growths, and have stories to 
tell; succeeding generations of birds come 
back year after year to the same nesting 
places. It is a place in which to dream nobly, 
to resolve strongly, to gain new surety that 
truth and love and loyalty are steadfast reali- 
ties. One day I found that death and change 
had entered even that paradise. A giant tree 
lay just as it fell to earth, with all its crown 
of foliage wreathing around it. Near the 
base the ground was strewn with chips, as if 
drops of lifeblood had fallen there. 

I walked along the mighty trunk of the 
fallen monarch, and found a seat on its broad 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 165 

bulk just where the branching limbs began to 
make an airy chamber, whose green roof did 
not altogether shut out the arch of the sky. 

I held in my hand a book written by one 
who had in his lifetime intimate acquaintance 
with all the deities of wave and wind, of star 
and cloud. If a bird sang in the far tree-tops, 
I could find him interpreted and glorified 
in the book; if the stream in its turn sang 
through the little valley, the book was aware 
of its crystal flow, and found in it " the force 
of the ice, the wreathing of the clouds, the 
gladness of the sky, and the continuance of 
Time ; " its writer was himself one of those 
"strange people " of whom this book tells us, 
who " had other loves than those of wealth, 
and other interests than those of commerce." 
He drew all beautiful things of earth and 
air into his thought "as you trace threads 
through figures on a silken damask." 

I opened the book and read the reasons 
why one man loved the things of nature and 
beauty, and why because of that love the light 
of morning yet shone for him upon the hills. 

" He took pleasure in them " — so I read 



166 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

from the open page — " because he had been 
bred among English fields and hills ; because 
the gentleness of a great race was in his heart 
and its powers of thought in his brain ; be- 
cause he knew the stories of the Alps and of 
the cities at their feet ; because he had read 
the Homeric legends of the clouds, and be- 
held the gods of dawn and the givers of dew 
to the fields ; because he knew the faces of 
the crags and the imagery of the passionate 
mountains as a man knows the face of his 
friend ; because he had in him the wonder 
and sorrow concerning life and death which 
are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from 
the days of its first sea-kings ; and also the 
compassion and the joy that are woven into 
the innermost fabric of every great imagina- 
tive spirit born now in countries that have 
lived by the Christian faith with any courage 
or truth." 

IV 

If it requires all this to enable one to see 
the full glory of the morning light upon the 
hills, it is yet a blessed thing to know that 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 167 

intimations of that light — vague imaginings 
of what its effulgence may be — are given to 
those of narrower vision, who are only dimly 
struggling toward it, 

Moving about in worlds not realized. 

It may be a part of the heaven that "lies 
about us in our infancy" that children so 
often seem instinctively to recognize not only 
what is most beautiful in nature, but also what 
is most admirable in literature. 

When I turn the pages of the Iliad now, 
the old Homeric tales are all penetrated with 
a fresher and more human interest than of 
old because they are inseparably associated 
in my memory with the picture of a green 
lawn where, amid the falling leaves, four little 
figures — two of them the dearest in the world 
for me — are valiantly besieging Troy. It is 
all very real to them. Under the big elm tree 
Hector parts from Andromache. 

The horsehair plume 
That grimly nodded from the lofty crest 

of that mighty warrior is a sight to make the 
beholder weep tears of joy. I hear myself 



168 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

told sternly, " If you laugh this time at the 
death of Patroclus you will have to go into 
the house ! " 

Near the scene of those funeral obsequies 
stands a great old apple tree whose arching 
top forms a fascinating audience room, with 
low, wide-spreading limbs whereon those who 
gather to listen may find seats delightfully in- 
secure. Here it was, within the circle of this 
New England tree, that the voyages of Ulys- 
ses found at last a happy ending. The little 
group who kept time with swinging feet while 
the " oars of Ithaca " 

All day long clave the silvery foam 

had little patience with Penelope's procrasti- 
nating methods with her suitors. 

"Why didn't she just tell 'em that she 
would n't have 'em ? " they inquired scorn- 
fully; but on that day — it was in apple- 
blossom time, I remember — when the sad 
queen, listening, heard the music of the old 
songs floating up into the chamber where she 
sat apart, and called in sudden anguish, — 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 169 

Cease, minstrel, cease, and sing some other song ; 
. . . the sweet words of it have hurt my heart. 
Others return, the other husbands, but 
Never for me that sail on the sea-line, 
Never a sound of oars beneath the moon, 
Nor sudden step beside me at midnight, 
Never Ulysses ! — 

on that apple-blossom day we felt very gloomy 
over Ulysses' tardiness. There were differ- 
ences of opinion among us as to whether the 
afflicting old song would most probably have 
been " The Old Oaken Bucket," or " Home, 
Sweet Home," or even — who could tell ? — 
" Way Down upon the Swanee River ; " but 
whether we believed it to be Greek or Ameri- 
can mattered little compared with our recog- 
nition of the fact that it must in some way, 
however imperfect, be touched with the primal 
emotions and reflect the eternal soul of things. 
When that is once understood, Greece and 
New England become common territory and 
the minstrels* strain echoes the cry of the 
heart in all ages. 

Not long ago I asked a grammar-school 
teacher which one among the short poems 
her pupils were taught to recite really ap- 



170 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

pealed to them most She told me that, when 
the children were allowed to select for them- 
selves, the choice almost always fell on that 
poem of Browning's which begins, — 

Such a starved bank of moss 
Till, that May-morn, 
Blue ran the flash across : 
Violets were born ! 

The three stanzas of this poem are full of 
subtle meaning; they are condensed, crammed 
full of implied action, whose processes the 
reader must supply for himself. The chil- 
dren, without grasping the subtlety, feel the 
action and get an uplift from it. They are 
assisting at the birth of violets and stars, and, 
as they recite, their voices tremble with the fer- 
vor of the impulse. 

A certain lonely road where I often drive 
has its entrance through one of the poorer 
quarters of the town. In the springtime, when 
the wild flowers begin to blossom, groups of 
children from those humble homes may be 
found all along the way, bending over the 
new-sprung grass, and filling their hands and 
hearts with the beauty which is nature s gift 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 171 

to rich and poor alike. Even the smallest tod- 
dlers are there, their chubby fists painfully- 
clasped around too rich a store of treasures. 

Once, as I drew near the spot where a clus- 
ter of these childish faces hung over a bank 
thick strewn with violets, I heard a musing 
little voice begin to murmur, — 

Such a starved bank of moss, 

then others took up the strain, until at the 
end a sounding chorus echoed the tidings 
of the birth of violets. Emerson rejoices in 
the man who has 

Loved the woodrose and left it on its stalk, 

but there is another gospel, that of the 
gathered flower. No matter what was the 
final fate of those plucked violets, whether 
they were carefully set in water, or withered 
where the warm little fingers had idly dropped 
them, they had fulfilled their mission, — into 
those starved young lives 

Violets were born ! 

I took with me on one of my drives a poor 
soul who has always found this world a work- 
aday spot. I learned anew what I had often 



172 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

been taught before, that it is not necessarily 
safe to judge people prosaic because they are 
compelled to lead prosaic lives. 

My companion drank in the beauty of 
earth and sky with the eagerness of one who 
has long been athirst Presently from the 
top of a high hill we looked down into a 
meadow whose green expanse was zigzagged 
back and forth by the silver windings and 
doublings of a brook. M For all the world like 
a silver braidin' pattern on green velvet," 
commented the voice by my side. I stopped 
the horse that the eager eyes might satisfy 
themselves with gazing, and in the stillness 
the voice of the waters spoke to us from afar. 

" I was thinking of something," my com- 
panion said, " something I read in a book, but 
it kind of escapes me. I can't quite get hold 
of it." 

" What book was it ? " I asked. 

" Well, I seem to have lost the title too. 
Strange, why I can't remember things. It 's 
a book about an old sailor, and the cost mark 
on it was seven dollars and fifty cents. Of 
course," she explained, " I did n't pay any 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 173 

such price for it. It come to me from a girl 
that had it for a Christmas present, and when 
her mother come to read it she put her foot 
down that 't was the kind of stuff she would n't 
have in the house. So I was doing some sew- 
ing for the girl, and she said I could have the 
book for what I 'd done, and if I 'd call it 
square she would. It is a curious kind of a 
story, but sometimes I 've sat up till most 
morning reading it, when I 'd ought to be abed 
too. It gets hold of me so I can't leave it." 

" Who wrote the book ? " I inquired, anx- 
ious to identify this fascinating volume. 

u Well," she replied doubtfully, " I have an 
idea it was one of Dant's." 

After a time the quotation she was seeking 
came back to my friend bit by bit, so that be- 
tween us we were able to piece it together, 
and this was it : — 

A noise like of a hidden brook 
In the leafy month of June, 
That to the sleeping woods all night 
Singeth a quiet tune. 

It was the Ancient Mariner that had held 
her with his glittering eye, and she had felt 



174 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

his power without being able to analyze the 
spell. 

11 1 always wanted a chance to read," she 
said, with a sigh, " and if there wan't so many 
buttonholes in the world perhaps life would 
be more worth while, — but, there ! there 's a 
better world to look forward to, when we get 
through with this one." 

Yes, poor soul of the starved longings, 
there must be, there is, a better world to 
come, and in that world, if one may trust the 
prophetic vision of the Old Masters, there 
are no buttonholes ; all the angelic draperies 
I have ever seen depicted were either tum- 
bling off altogether or simply hanging by a 
thread. In that blessed and buttonholeless 
country may you, a happy Wedding Guest, 
find all that you have missed here on earth 
and — if you so desire — sit in some green 
nook of the Elysian meadows reading the 
livelong day ! 



There is a certain college library whose 
delights often woo me, especially during the 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 175 

quiet of the vacation season. Then, in the 
summer mornings, I not infrequently have the 
great room to myself, save for the quiet pre- 
sence of the portraits and busts. 

The sightless Milton, with his hair 
Around his placid temples curled, 

often speaks to me from his pedestal, and 
from the shelves the crowding voices of the 
masters call, but the green slopes and lawns 
of the campus are so silent that one may hear 
the trees that grow close to the windows 
whisper " their green felicity," as if the babble 
of term time had never known existence and 
the ancient nymphs and dryads were mur- 
muring there still. 

It is owing to the relation of this library to 
the outside world that the silver loop of water 
with which the Kennebec here bounds the 
eastern slope takes on such chameleon shapes. 

Now it becomes the Ilissus, on whose 
banks sit Socrates and Phaedrus " in some 
quiet spot." The tall tree which Phaedrus 
has chosen because of its shade is plainly vis- 
ible from the window. 

" Yes," he tells Socrates, " this is the tree." 



176 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

" Yes, indeed," says Socrates, " and a fair 
and shady resting-place, full of summer 
sounds and scents ; moreover, there is a 
sweet breeze, and the grasshoppers chirrup, 
and the greatest charm of all is the grass, 
like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My 
dear Phasdrus, you have been an admirable 
guide," and then he ceases to " babble of 
green fields," and returns to that " bait of 
discourse, by whose spell," he tells Phaedrus, 
" you may lead me all round Attica and over 
the wide world." 

Now, as if by magic, the scene changes, 
and it is Edmund Spenser whom one hears, 
calling across English meadows, — 

Sweet Themmes, runne softly till I end my song ; 

or, perchance, the echoing sigh of Burns's 
lament over " bonny Doon," or Wordsworth 
singing by the banks of Yarrow. 

From the window of this southern alcove, 
where one sees the full curve of the river as 
it plunges toward the falls, the shining stream 
becomes the Rhone as Ruskin saw it " alike 
through bright day and lulling night, the 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 177 

never-pausing plunge, and never-fading flash, 
and never-hushing whisper." 

In the golden dusk of twilight comes the 
fairest metamorphosis of all, for then the 
great mill that stretches along the eastern 
river-bank becomes a Venetian palace on the 
Grand Canal, with myriad lights reflecting in 
the glancing waters ; there, in the vague dis- 
tance, looms the shadowy bulk of St. Mark's, 
and in the little crumbling vestibule room, 
where the marble doge sleeps under the win- 
dow, the last shaft of dying light falls full upon 
his unanswering face. Inside the library the 
close-filled shelves open out into unending vis- 
tas. From this upper shelf to which I first raise 
my eyes, the way leads to an English coun- 
try house, upon the bowling green of which, 
" shut off from the garden by a thick yew 
hedge," my Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim 
surmount the difficulties of the siege of Na- 
mur. 

" ' Summer is coming on,' declares Trim ; 
1 your honor might sit out of doors and give 
me the nography of the town or citadel your 
honor was pleased to sit down before, and 



178 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

I '11 be shot by your honor upon the glacis of 
it, if I do not fortify it to your honor's mind.' 

" ' I dare say thou wouldst, Trim,' " my 
Uncle replies. 

Farther along on the same shelf a row of 
faded volumes of De Quincey — faded? nay, 
rather let us say time-mellowed — exhale a 
breath from the Lake Country where their 
author lived. On what depths these volumes 
open, — depths of the visible heavens, depths 
of the skies of dreams ! 

Here is that exquisite twilight atmosphere 
through which the child De Quincey views 
for the first time the pale and silent pomp of 
Death ; here the midnight skies of London 
loom with a shadowed radiance over that rare 
and tender idyl of Oxford Street ; here, " in 
the broad light of the summer evening," we 
start from London to carry the news of Tala- 
vera to the waiting country-side. This is no 
opium mirage, but aglorious reality. " Dressed 
in laurels and flowers, oak leaves and ribbons," 
we thunder along, " kindling at every instant 
new successions of burning joy," every heart 
leaping at our approach. The pomp of the 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 179 

night goes with us, the heavens exult above 
our heads, and when we meet the poor mother 
whose son's regiment was all but annihilated 
in the fight, we lift for her no funeral banners, 
no laurels overshadowing the bloody trench, 
but we tell her " how these dear children of 
England, privates and officers, leaped their 
horses over all obstacles as gayly as hunters 
to the morning chase," how they rode into the 
mists of death as children to a mother's knee. 

As we read the story the old thrill leaps 
into our pulses, — the thrill that woke at our 
moment of victory. It was not for Talavera, 
not even, perhaps, for Gettysburg or San 
Juan, but whether the triumph were a tangible 
or intangible one, the uplift that came with it 
marked an instant of supreme emotion, and 
from that upper shelf in the library bookcase 
the whole horizon of life widens toward eternal 
nobleness. 

It was in the alcove where the elm and 
maple trees stand nearest the window that I 
chanced for the first time on Casimir Dela- 
vigne's " Toilette de Constance." It happened 
on one of those dazzling summer mornings 



180 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

when all the landscape seems to sparkle with 

light. The tall trees waved their boughs like 

banners, and the procession of college willows 

marched down the slope toward the shining 

river reaches, as if they celebrated a triumph. 

The story began with all the joy of the gay 

morning. There was the sparkling young 

face in the mirror, decking itself into more 

radiant beauty, impatient for the adjustment of 

the necklace, the ribbon, that should make a 

fair form fairer still. She hastened the maid : 

Vite, Anna, vite ; au miroir 
Plus vite, Anna ! 

Then the dance music began to throb through 

the measure : — 

L'heure s'avance, 
Et je vais au bal ce soir 
Chez l'ambassadeur de France. 

Now Love entered : — 

II y sera ; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main ! 
En y pensant, a peine je respire ! 

The toilette of Constance was finished. 
(Hark! how just at that moment through 
the open alcove window the river plashed a 
liquid note of joy.) Just one more glance in 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 181 

the mirror — the last! " J'ai l'assurance," she 
cried, — 

Qu'on va m'adorer ce soir 

Chez l'ambassadeur de France. 

Then — and it seemed almost incredible 
amidst that laughing pageant of nature which 
surrounded me as I read — Death entered the 
scene. Constance, admiring herself, stepped 
near the hearth ; a flying spark fell on her 
light robe ; oh, how few those breathless mo- 
ments till it was all ended ! 

L'horrible feu ronge avec volupte 

Ses bras, son sein, et l'entoure et s'eleve, 

Et sans pitie devore sa beaute', 

Ses dix-huit ans, helas, et son doux reve ! 

That one untranslatable word volupte marked 
the crisis of the tragedy ; then came the sum- 
ming up : — 

Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour ! 

On disait, Pauvre Constance ! 
Et on dansait jusqu'au jour 

Chez l'ambassadeur de France. 

I stood this morning in the same library 
alcove, and the swaying boughs weaving 
quaint patterns on the springtime grass moved 



182 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

to and fro to that old strain of dance music. 
The college willows, which have looked down 
on so many generations of youth, seemed full 
of the echo, — 

Ses dix-huit ans, helas, et son doux reve ! 
for in those swift-moving stanzas, without one 
superfluous word or line, all was there, the 
philosophy and the tragedy of life. 

When one mounts to the gallery of the 
library one finds a different world. Here are 
the curious old memoirs and biographies, the 
superfluous and unused driftwood of litera- 
ture, the old editions that have served their 
time and passed into dignified retirement. 
In this shady nook dwell Evelina and Pamela, 
hobnobbing in stilted, ceremonious fashion 
with Sir Charles Grandison, and looking 
askance at Miss Edgeworth's heroes and 
heroines. Odd volumes of the minor poets 
congregate here, and musty-smelling folios 
where longfs hold sway. Yet in the midst 
of these worthies one may chance upon a 
thumb-marked copy of " Spare Hours," and, 
opening at random, finds himself suddenly 
climbing to " high Minchmoor," along the 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 183 

same road where Montrose's troopers once 
fled. Past the great house of Traquair you go, 
where the bears of Bradwardine stand senti- 
nel, and the path you tread is full of the lilt 
of song : — 

And what saw ye there 

In the bush aboon Traquair, 
Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed ? 

I heard the cushies croon 

Through the gowden afternoon, 
And the Quair burn singing down to the vale o' Tweed. 

And so, as you look from the high window, 
that silver loop of the Kennebec finds another 
transformation. 

In the dim corner under the stairs, in a 
quiet, conservative, English-seeming atmo- 
sphere, long rows of Littell's magazines dwell 
in the shadow of decorum. He who browses 
here will enter many Old World homes and 
become acquainted with the dwellers therein. 
It was one of these quaint gentlewomen who 
first read to me — I sat on a Chippendale 
chair the while, and looked out upon the 
verdant stretches of an ancestral park — that 
exquisite poem of Moore's : — 



i8 4 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

No wonder, Mary, that thy story 
Touches all hearts. 

Into that dark library corner she came, poor, 

sinning, beautiful Mary, and lighted all the 

dusk 

with those bright locks of gold 

(So oft the gaze of Bethany). 

Here have I foregathered in the intimacy of 
home life with the Brownings, the Carlyles, 
and many another English writer of note, 
have darned stockings with Mrs. John Taylor 
of Norwich, and fallen in love with the seventh 
Lord Shaftesbury in an intimacy which began 
beside a humble grave in a quiet English 
churchyard. 

VI 

Standing the other day before the shelves of 
another alcove in this protean library, I took 
down one by one the bound volumes of the 
" Atlantic Monthly " during the war years from 
1 86 1 to 1865. The time was the 28th of May; 
another Memorial Day was soon to dawn, 
and here I found the whole intimate story 
of the civil war, from the time of " Charles- 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 185 

ton Under Arms " and " Washington as a 
Camp " to " The Death of Abraham Lin- 
coln " and the reconstruction period. 

If I sought a garland to lay upon the graves 
of our unforgotten heroes, what a splendid 
bouquet of verse lay shut within these pages ! 
Poems at first hand, fresh-blooming, to be 
read by eyes that kindled with new and vivid 
emotions, — 

Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms, 
To deck our girls for gay delights ! 

— here we begin with a whole shining par- 
terre of blossoms. Place this deep-hued peony 
next : — 

The crimson flower of battle blooms 
And solemn marches fill the nights. 

Now Holmes gathers a handful of starry 
petals : — 

What flower is this that greets the morn, 
Its hues from heaven so freshly born ? 

Dew-washed, we find it " where lonely sen- 
tries tread," and touch its wreathing colors 
tenderly, — 

The Starry Flower of Liberty. 



186 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

Here are the " Biglow Papers " where Lowell 

tells us, 

I, country-born an' bred, know where to find 
Some blooms to make the season suit the mind, 

and then he showers them upon us, wild 

flowers that never grow tame, 

Half-vent'rin' liverworts in furry coats, 
Bloodroots whose rolled-up leaves ef you oncurl, 
Each on 'em 's cradle to a baby-pearl, — 

stout dandelions, snapdragon, touch-me-not, 
fire-weed, deepening by and by where a scar- 
let king-cup shines, to 

Wut 's words to them whose faith an' truth 

On War's red techstone rung true metal, 
Who ventered life an' love an' youth 

For the gret prize o' death in battle ? 
To him who, deadly hurt, agen 

Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 
Tippin' with fire the bolt o' men 

That rived the Rebel line asunder ? 

Now wreathe in a long spray of trumpet- 
flowers : — 

The flags of war like storm-birds fly, 
The charging trumpets blow, 
and 
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call 

retreat. 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 187 

Add a royal fleur-de-lis for the " Washers 

of the Shroud: " — 

Tears may be ours, but proud, for those who win 
Death's royal purple in the foeman's lines. 

Next a handful of Brownell's tiger-lilies ; 
cypress and rue for martyred Lincoln, to 
mark where 

The Dark Flower of Death 
Blooms in the fadeless fields ; 

then blood-stained chalices from the " Ode to 
Freedom : " — 

Whiter than moonshine upon snow 
Her raiment is, but round the hem 
Crimson-stained. 

Last of all, before we lay our completed 
garland upon the graves that have been green 
with the verdure of many a returning spring- 
time, let us pluck anew Whittier's olive bough 
of peace fair as when it was first gathered : — 

Ring and swing, 
Bells of joy ! On morning's wing 
Send the song of praise abroad ! 
With a sound of broken chains 
Tell the nations that He reigns 
Who alone is God and Lord ! 



188 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 

This memorial wreath, which we have 
twined leaf by leaf from the printed leaves 
where it first blossomed, is not one which 
can be shut within four library walls. Its 
flowery chain links the green mounds on in- 
numerable hillsides to the hearts of living 
men wherever hearts beat for sacrifice and 
honor. 

VII 

We belong to a nation of " great readers." 
We devour popular novels with an unfailing 
appetite and a literary range which extends 
from the known to the unknown, and does 
not necessarily discriminate greatly between 
Mrs. Ward and Bertha M. Clay. 

We are fast becoming an out-of-doors peo- 
ple. Not only our heroines and heroes of 
fiction, but our " real folks " sigh continually 
for " the open." Nature, to many of us, is a 
deity to be approached with bared head, thick 
shoes, and rolled-up sleeves ; to be propitiated 
with golf clubs and fishing rods ; to be enter- 
tained with athletic sports of varying kinds 
and degrees ; and in return for our devotion 



THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 189 

she bestows on us a hearty appetite for beef- 
steak, and lends increased zest to a soothing 
pipe in hours of meditation or stupor. 

We are a practical people, much inclined 
to believe that there are few things in heaven 
or earth which cannot be reduced to a scien- 
tific formula. 

Yet outside this world of superficiality and 
robustness and " common sense " there is 
another universe, whose meanings no formu- 
las can ever express, whose bounds can never 
be measured by sea or star or space, a world 
of immortalities that differs from the other as 
" the consecration and the poet's dream " 
differ from the multiplication table, and it is 
as true of this world as of the other that "to 
him that hath shall be given." 



VII 

CONCERNING TEMPERANCE AND 
JUDGMENT TO COME 



CONCERNING TEMPER- 
ANCE AND JUDGMENT 
TO COME 



SOME years ago, at a period when I still 
continued to have an immense appetite 
for life, I suddenly, and rather unexpectedly 
to myself, blossomed into a full-fledged re- 
former or reformeress, whichever you choose 
to call it. 

I say unexpectedly, and yet, as I look back, 
I can see that for a long time previous to 
this apotheosis my habits had been vaguely 
leading up to it. As a headquarters for 
tramps, temperance lecturers, Young Men 
Christians, delegates to Sunday-School Con- 
ventions, and similar wanderers on the face 
of the earth, my house had always been " run 
wide open." There was, undoubtedly, a 
special mark somewhere about the premises 



i 9 4 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

that indicated my husband and myself as 
the ideal host and hostess alike for wayside 
wanderers and all creatures with a mission. 
We took them in, fed them, clothed them, — 
if necessary, — talked over their special en- 
thusiasms with them, and sent them upon 
their meandering way with the hope — when 
we stopped to think about it at all — that 
our hospitality had in some way furthered 
the kingdom of righteousness. 

This complaisance did not, on my part at 
least, necessarily indicate any really discrim- 
inating sympathy with the respective missions 
of my visitors ; it simply meant, in most in- 
stances, that I possessed an inordinate zest 
for affairs, for trying experiments and tak- 
ing chances. The system of moral ethics in 
which I had been educated was not a com- 
plicated one. Certain things, so I had been 
taught, were broadly and indubitably right, 
and other things were just as conspicuously 
wrong. Between these domains of good and 
evil there was a clear line of demarcation 
whose uncompromising distinctness admitted 
of no shading off whatever. This was a good 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 195 

working theory, and, it must be admitted, re- 
sulted in a race of strong, if rather rigid, men 
and women. It also threw around unformulat- 
ing spirits like my own an aegis of direction 
as useful as Matthew Arnold believed the 
creed of the Established Church to be to un- 
reasoning souls. Under its guidance we went 
on cheerfully and blunderingly toward the 
light. I am often sorry that I ever began 
to analyze. That code of ethics which de- 
fined right and wrong with such finality, 
and comprehended the whole duty of man in 
always shoving the good onward and stamp- 
ing out the evil whenever one had the oppor- 
tunity, was much less difficult to follow out 
than one that regulates sin by the heredity 
and environment of the individual, and re- 
lieves him of responsibility if his skull does 
not fit accurately over the gray matter be- 
neath. 

In those happy bygone days when right 
was right and wrong was wrong I went gayly 
on my predestined way of assisting everybody 
to educate the morals of everybody else, un- 
deterred by any morbid questioning in regard 



196 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

to the tenability of my own position. There 
was, so far as I remember, only one occasion 
when I actually balked at any duty which was 
suggested to me. A constitutional amend- 
ment to the prohibitory law of Maine was, 
after a strenuous campaign, to be submitted 
to popular vote. I do not think I knew then, 
and I am very sure I do not know now, just 
what the amendment was about, but I know 
I believed in it, whatever it was, just as I be- 
lieve in the law itself, and shall believe so 
long as I have reason to think that every rum- 
seller in the United States would rejoice to 
have it repealed. When, however, it was pro- 
posed as my sacred duty on this momentous 
occasion to serve hot coffee at the polls, and 
decorate the brows of doubtful voters with 
propitiating garlands, my spirit rebelled. I 
felt sure that, right or wrong, I preferred polls 
where liquid refreshments were not dealt out, 
and voters whose brows were decorated only 
by common sense. 

Yet all these preliminary movements were 
leading up to the fateful moment of the form- 
ation of the Woman's Temperance League of 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 197 

Waterville. It is an unfortunate fact that the 
prohibitory law of Maine is sometimes vio- 
lated just as the license laws of other States 
are violated, and some of the prominent men 
of the town, who were themselves otherwise 
occupied, suggested to some of the prominent 
women, who always have leisure to reform 
things, that the hour for such reformation had 
struck. 

I was not one of those who signed the call 
for the meeting which was to inaugurate the 
new order of things, but I was of the num- 
ber that promptly answered when the bugle 
note sounded. Had there been a call to 
form a society for altering the configura- 
tion of the earth, there were some of us who 
would, in those days, have presented our- 
selves with the same cheerful promptness, 
sustained not so much by our courage as by 
our ignorance. 

We were women who thirsted for action ; 
show us something to be done, and without 
altogether knowing what, or why, or how, we 
rallied at the sound of the tocsin. Would we 
form a league to wipe out intemperance ? 



198 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

Certainly. We had no hesitation in under- 
taking a little task like that. 

March, march, Eskdale and Liddlesdale, 

All the Blue Bonnets are bound for the border ! 

After all, it is by just such unreasoning 
courage as this that many good works have 
been accomplished. I wish — stay, do I 
wish ? — that I were young enough and hope- 
ful enough to do it all over again. 

It had been promised by the instigators of 
our league — the care-laden gentlemen who 
had not time to league themselves — that 
when we were duly organized they would co- 
operate by joining in a mass meeting whose 
utterances should eloquently launch us on 
our career. While we were assembled in sol- 
emn conclave in regard to this mass meeting 
these good men were seized with sudden fore- 
bodings in regard to their part in such a de- 
monstration. Was it wise — thus inquired 
the delegate who hurried to confer with us — 
to convoke a public meeting without first as- 
certaining the temper of the community in 
regard to the object to be accomplished ? 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 199 

Would it not be a politic plan to appoint a 
committee for circulating a petition among 
the business men of the town to ascertain 
whether a majority of them really desired to 
have the law enforced ? 

This suggestion, had it only been made at 
an earlier period of the world's history, would 
have furnished a practical precedent for Moses 
when he received the Ten Commandments 
on the Mount. " Would it not be wiser," he 
would, thus warned, have suggested politely, 
"if I first take a stroll down the mountain 
and ascertain what the feeling of the Children 
of Israel is in regard to having so many com- 
mandments unloaded on them in one afflict- 
ing lump ? " 

There is a great deal said about the eman- 
cipation of the modern woman. My own 
observation goes to show that there is no 
amount of foolishness to which she will not 
lend herself at the instigation of man. In 
this case our delegate had only to suggest, 
and we appointed a committee at once to 
go forth into the highways and byways and 
ascertain the number of those who had not 



200 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

bowed the knee to Baal. So far as I can find 
out, a man seldom hesitates to sign a petition 
because it is immoral, — it is only the moral 
ones which he has a conscience against 
endorsing hastily. The circumstance of his 
being fortunate enough to be a reasoning 
creature, too, furnishes him with a large stock 
of hesitancies. 

The lawyers did not sign our petition, be- 
cause the fact that a law was on the statute 
books constituted in itself sufficient reason for 
its enforcement; the physicians, as a class, 
did not care to commit themselves, though 
one of them assured us that a two or three 
gallon keg of whiskey or brandy would fur- 
nish all that was medicinally necessary for 
the use of the community during a year ; the 
clergymen without exception, I think, gave 
us their endorsement, partly because " it is 
their nature to " endorse such causes, and 
partly because they are not so constitutionally 
thirsty as their brethren of the other profes- 
sions. Some of the storekeepers signed the 
petition because they thought a strict enforce- 
ment of the law would help their business, 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 201 

and others declined to sign lest their inter- 
ests should be injured by enforcement. All 
sorts of politic considerations and twists and 
turns of argument came into the matter. 
One man declined to sign because he did not 
believe in women as reformers. A woman's 
place, he said, was at home looking after her 
husband and her family, and if she had no 
husband and family it was equally fitting that 
she should devote herself to minding her own 
business, whatever it might be. When asked 
what course a woman might legitimately pur- 
sue in regard to a drunken husband, this 
philosopher opined that it was perfectly al- 
lowable for her to " shut him up." This, he 
stated candidly, was his wife's method with 
himself. Whenever he was observed to have 
vanished from public view for a season we 
were at liberty to suppose that he was repent- 
ing his sins in a state of incarceration. 

The canvass, with all its humors, difficul- 
ties, and disagreeablenesses, — which latter 
it did not lack, — at last ended, summing up 
a decided majority of influential voters who 
were willing the law should be enforced, pro- 



202 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

vided it could be done without any undue 
exertion on their own part. The mass meet- 
ing was therefore held, and the tide of elo- 
quence duly poured out. Launched on this 
wave of plaudits the Woman's Temperance 
League was supposed to be amply strength- 
ened and encouraged to be able to pursue 
what Amy March would have called its " Her- 
culaneum labors " indefinitely and triumph- 
antly. 

That this was a woman's campaign was 
sufficiently indicated by the simplicity, naivete, 
and directness with which it was conducted. 
No man would have dared to do some of the 
things we did, even if he could have brought 
himself to believe in their efficacy, but to us 
there seemed but one watchword in leading 
a forlorn hope : " Up, boys, and at 'em ! " 

There were at that time three weekly 
newspapers in Waterville. The two Repub- 
lican journals gave us a half column each of 
space in which to declare our sentiments and 
report our progess from week to week. The 
Democratic paper devoted itself to candid 
criticism. " The Waterville Woman's Tern- 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 203 

perance League," remarked a contemporary 
journal, " has rushed into print." 

The local political situation was such that 
we were allowed great freedom of expression 
in our utterances. We were voteless, irre- 
sponsible beings with a propensity for calling 
a spade a spade so far as it could be done 
consistently with dignity and self-respect, and 
many a Waterville citizen went around in 
those days with an uneasy sense that if any 
of the coats advertised in our temperance 
column fitted him, he was at perfect liberty 
to put it on. The critical Democratic journal 
said unhandsome things about us, and being 
but women, we sometimes wept over these 
compliments o' nights. In the morning, how- 
ever, we dried our tears and went back to 
the fighting line again. With all the crude- 
nesses and the mistakes that can be urged 
against it, that period of my life is not one I 
am going to feel meaching about when I 
come before the final bar of judgment. 

Notwithstanding the unpopularity of our 
movement, — and with a certain portion of 
the community it was necessarily unpopular, 



2o 4 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

— the membership of our league did not 
materially decrease, and even the most timid 
and naturally conservative women among us 
accepted astounding tasks with astounding 
courage. There never was an enterprise more 
fertile in stunts than this one of ours. We 
sat in the City Liquor Agency, to which 
source of supply the increasing dryness of 
the times drove many thirsty souls, and noted 
the number of quarts of alcohol required by 
town paupers, Saturday night invalids, and 
men whose wives had weak backs; we con- 
fronted the City Fathers to give them a rea- 
son for the faith that was in us; we raised 
money by subscription, by entertainments, by 
breakfasts, dinners, and suppers ; we clothed, 
fed, and admonished the poor; we wept, we 
prayed, and, to keep our courage up, some of 
us laughed a good deal. We made ourselves 
very unwelcome, very much unappreciated, 
very much criticised ; and it was, I think, this 
saving sense of humor which carried us 
through. I remember serving, with great in- 
ward reluctance, on various committees, the 
results to be expected from whose labors 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 205 

must, as it seems to me now, have been purely- 
ethical, consisting, as in the modern interpre- 
tation of the virtue of prayer, principally in 
the beneficial effects on the mind of the per- 
former. In one instance, which often comes 
back to me, one of the three leaders of a for- 
lorn hope was influenced wholly by an unques- 
tioning sense of the moral necessity of her 
mission, while the other two were hampered 
by a somewhat ludicrous vision of its inefficacy. 
In the remembrance, the humor of the scene 
outbalances its more serious aspects, — the 
courteous victim, firmly resolved to be man- 
nerly though the heavens fell, yet inwardly 
wishing that women would be contented to at- 
tend to their own affairs ; the earnest spokes- 
woman, explaining her mission with the full 
conviction that only a mutual comprehension 
was needed to produce a delightful unity of 
sentiment; and the two doubters, pinching 
each other in the background, and trying not 
to ruin the situation by an untimely grin. 

We wished, perhaps, no less sincerely than 
our companion that the kingdom of heaven 
might come upon earth, but the belief in the 



206 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

immediate efficacy of moral suasion as a 
practical agent is largely a matter of temper- 
ament. 

Whether the crusade of the Woman's Tem- 
perance League accomplished, on the whole, 
any permanent good, is a question which I 
have often asked myself. The movement was 
full of pathetically humorous phases, but it 
was also heroically sincere. I suppose many 
efforts which seem futile to us as we look 
back upon them have an efficacy which we 
do not realize, because our vision takes in so 
small a part of the eternal scheme of things. 

There shall never be one lost good ! what was shall 

live as before ; 
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound ; 
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much 

good more, 
On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven a perfect 

round. 

When I remember the many mornings of 
waking to consciousness with a direful sink- 
ing of the heart at the thought that it was 
my melancholy duty to go on crusading, — 
alas, how unfailingly we see the pathos of 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 207 

our own woes! — when, to put selfishness one 
side, I recall the fortitude of those other 
women more timid than myself, I sometimes 
cherish the modest hope that there is at least 
one unbroken arc laid up in the happy here- 
after for the warrioresses of the Woman's 
Temperance League of Waterville. There 
is no moral reason that I know why Noah 
should possess the only arc — spell it how 
you like — upon those heavenly highlands ! 

II 

I think the psychological aspect of the 
question was first brought home to me during 
that historic campaign of the Woman's Tem- 
perance League when I recognized the atti- 
tude of the old French Canadian women who 
came to the City Agency on Saturday after- 
noons for alcohol with which to manufacture 
the weekly dram of " split " that should trans- 
form them from grubs into butterflies. To 
them this longed-for indulgence was neither 
moral nor immoral ; it was simply a matter 
of enjoyment The magic draught furnished 
for them the same element of excitement 



208 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

which the theatre, the popular novel, the 
enthusiasms of football and baseball and 
other fashionable expedients furnish to better 
educated people. It was the alleviation that 
made their starved lives bearable. When they 
threatened to come with their brooms and 
sweep out the meddling women who were 
interfering with the good cheer furnished by 
the Agency, they too were, in their own esti- 
mation, leading a crusade for freedom and 
the rights of the individual. 

It is a safe conclusion in regard to the 
average man that however logical he may be 
in mind, he is bound to be more or less irre- 
sistibly //logical in acts. This is because the 
intellectual assent is usually biased somewhat 
by the influence of the human qualification. 
Each of us recognizes the law in its applica- 
tion to the other fellow. Hence the reformer 
who really desires to get at the root of the 
matter should be a person of active imagina- 
tion, and an adaptability which enables him 
to comprehend the standpoint of the individ- 
ual to be reformed ; above all, he should pos- 
sess no theories incapable of modification. If 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 209 

he can add to these qualifications a sense of 
humor, a readiness not to take himself too 
seriously, and a recognition of the fact that 
the other man's right and wrong may differ in 
conception from his right and wrong, he will 
have an outfit which will materially lighten 
a thorny path. Thus much I discovered in 
my own brief career as a reformeress. 

The advantages of a lively imagination 
and an active interest in other people's affairs 
I undoubtedly possess. There is in me also, 
I sadly fear, a suggestion of inherent wick- 
edness which has always made it easy for 
sinners to confide their weaknesses to my ear 
with an unflattering certainty of my compre- 
hension. During my aforementioned temper- 
ance campaign one kindly disposed gentle- 
man, who was at that time recovering from 
an attack of delirium tremens, came to sit 
with me for an hour or two, that I might 
observe with my own eyes the discomforts 
attendant upon his malady. 

" Do you suppose," he inquired, when we 
had ended a breathless period of chasing rats 
around his hat brim, " that any man, espe- 



210 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

daily a man of my age, would turn himself 
into a blooming menagerie if he could help 
it ? I guess not." 

" What makes you do it, then ? " I asked 
rather vacuously. 

" I do it now because I have an Appetite 
for drink, — and you can spell it with a large 
A, — but when I began the cursed business 
it was all for fun. Well," my visitor added 
meditatively, " I 've had fun." 

Another appreciative individual called on 
me on his way to the railway station, that I 
might enter intelligently into his motives in 
taking the Keeley Cure. 

" I ain't going for the purpose of pleasing 
myself," he declared. " If it was n't for the 
way my wife feels about it I should n't ever 
take any Keeley Cures. When people tell you 
that there ain't any fun in drinking, you just 
mention to 'em that they don't know. The 
most fun I 've ever had in my life has been 
when I had jusj: enough aboard to make me 
feel good ; an' when I 've heard preachers pro- 
claiming from the pulpit that there was n't 
any enjoyment to be derived from the pleas- 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 211 

ures o' the world, I 've been tempted to stand 
right up in my tracks an' tell 'em to talk 
about what they understood." 

" The preachers usually qualify it a little. 
They say there is no true pleasure in these 
things," I suggested. 

" True fiddlesticks ! " commented my friend 
derisively. " The fact is," with a sudden 
change of tone, "my wife 's an awful good 
woman, and if she wants me to quit spreeing 
it I 'd ought to be willing to please her, and 
I am willing. But I 'd never do it to please 
myself." 

It was at about this period, too, that I was 
interviewed by a gentleman of sprightly turn 
of mind, and gifted with great facility for 
unvarnished narrative. 

" For God's sake," he began without pre- 
amble, " can't you, 'mongst all the discoveries 
you 're makin', find something kind o' inno- 
cent and excitin' to amuse a man like me ? " 

" What would be the nature of it ? " I in- 
quired, a good deal overwhelmed by the diffi- 
culties of the task proposed. 

" That 's jest what I don' know," answered 



212 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

my interlocutor ; " if I did I should n't be ask- 
in' you. It 's this way with me, an' I ain't the 
only one in the same case : I 'm old enough, 
mebbe you '11 say, to settle down, but I ain't 
settled down an' I don' know 's I ever shall. 
There 's plenty of 'em thinks I 'd ought to be 
contented with goin' to prayer-meetin' once 
or twice a week, but if there 's any recrea- 
tion about prayer-meetin's I 've never found 
it out. I like to read the ' Youth's Compan- 
ion/ but I can't set at home and do that every 
night in the week. I want something differ- 
ent," — warming to his subject, — "if it wan't 
nothing more than a toboggan slide on the 
other side of the river." 

" I don't see anything in the way of your 
tobogganing," I commented rather help- 
lessly. I seemed to be wholly at a loss for 
original suggestions. 

" I don't want to toboggan all by myself. 
I want you to be there and all the rest of 'em 
standin' in a row at the top o' the hill ; an' 
then all git on our sleds at the same minute 
an' slide — slide like the devil ! " 

At this flight of fancy the face of the narra- 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 213 

tor glowed with enthusiasm and poetic inten- 
sity. In fancy he saw the whole circle of his 
acquaintance sliding like the — ahem ! and 
he knew that the realization of that visionary 
transit would satisfy a long-felt want of his 
being. I confess that I understood him per- 
fectly. I, too, had longed to toboggan. In his 
rude and imperfect dreaming he had uncon- 
sciously got to the bottom, or, at any rate, 
one of the bottoms, of the whole matter. 

Starved longings, unrealized desires, over- 
flowing animal spirits without legitimate out- 
let, unbalanced natures destitute of training 
in self-control, impoverished aspirations, — 
these are what lie at the foundation of the so- 
cial problem which the reformer has to solve, 
and no remedy which does not take all these 
into consideration will ever be permanently 
efficacious. The would-be reformer should be 
willing to disabuse himself of prejudices, and 
cultivate what is known as " an open mind ;" 
not so open, either, as to interfere with its 
capability for being violently closed as often 
as occasion demands. 

When one strips the situation of phrases 



214 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

one is forced to acknowledge that there are 
a great many people who intend to do only 
what they find pleasure in doing, and who do 
not recognize any enjoyment in abstract good- 
ness. " You say," they tell us in effect, " that 
to be good is to be happy. Prove it." We 
cannot prove it, at least in any concrete form, 
and there is no sensible reason why we should 
desire to prove it, but no doubt we shall go on 
making the statement until the end of time. 

There is also an increasing number of in- 
dividuals who, so far from finding recreations, 
or even comfort and peace, in prayer-meetings, 
find them only irredeemably dull. If there is 
a steady decrease in the demand for prayer- 
meetings and a correspondingly steady in- 
crease in the appetite for — say, toboggan- 
sliding, might there not be found, gradually, 
naturally, and not reprehensibly, some mid- 
dle ground of interest through which more 
prayer-meetingers can be induced to con- 
sider the merits of tobogganing, and more 
tobogganers drawn into prayer-meetings ? 

It is a tendency of mankind to go on look- 
ing at subjects from an established stand- 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 215 

point long after the conditions which created 
that standpoint have become a thing of the 
past ; and this is especially true in regard to 
questions of morals. Many people feel at once 
that to be betrayed into any fresh theory or ad- 
mission on moral subjects is an inevitable step 
toward immorality. " He holds liberal views," 
they say, and shake their pious heads with 
conscious joy in their own narrowness. Yet 
to hold liberal views may mean nothing more 
than to be possessed of a willingness to search 
for and accept truth. If a great many peo- 
ple who " want to be angels," or think they 
do, could have the privilege; if a good many 
more, who have no angelic leanings whatever, 
and never will have, could be removed to 
their appropriate destination ; and if the re- 
mainder, being persons of penetrable epider- 
mis, could read their titles clear to stripping 
moral questions of futilities and dealing with 
moral conditions as they are, what an im- 
mense amount of powder might be saved ! 

To say that prayer-meetings are dull is 
an irreverence, therefore one should never 
breathe the thought ; to say that people de- 



216 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

mand excitement and recreation is to ac- 
knowledge the frivolity of the race, hence 
such a craving should never be put forward 
as representing a genuine need of human 
nature: yet many prayer-meetings are dull, 
and a large proportion of mankind do in- 
sistently demand to be amused ; and since 
these are self-evident facts, the practical ques- 
tion arises, What are we going to do about 
it? 

Our forefathers were a church-going peo- 
ple, but it does not necessarily follow that 
they were more innately religious than our 
own generation. They lived in an age when 
the stern conditions of existence furnished a 
continuous undercurrent of excitement, and 
what was lacking in other ways was more 
than made up to them by the nerve-thrilling, 
soul-harrowing amenities of their creeds. 
They were believers in a tangible hell, and to 
go to church on Sunday and listen to a sermon 
which depicted each hearer as dangling over 
a genuine, red-hot, steam-fitted Inferno, just 
as a spider sways on a single filament of his 
web, offered an excitement outbalancing the 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 217 

tensest moment of a football game, or even of 
a crisis in the stock market. 

The man who drove his plough over a hill- 
side never so remote, meditating as he toiled 
on the doctrine that doomed a large propor- 
tion of the race to everlasting punishment, 
and made the election of those who should 
be saved an arbitrary one, dependent upon 
the whim of a Deity whose caprices must 
never be criticised, — such a man carried in 
his lonely bosom a whole volume of inten- 
sities. The sombre atmosphere of a creed 
like that was lurid enough to color the most 
commonplace days and nights, and lend a 
fearful joy to the barrenest existence. 

When the old-fashioned belief in a con- 
crete Sheol was taken out of our theology, 
religion, whatever it may have gained, was 
shorn of its most fascinating risk. " Man," 
says Sabatier, " is incurably religious ; " he is 
also incurably opposed to monotony, and the 
faith that gets any permanent hold alike upon 
his intellect and his emotions must be a broad 
and sane Christianity which — taking into 
account every rooted instinct of his nature — 



218 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

makes the tendencies of both body and soul 
enter into vigorous and sensible character- 
building. 

I do not believe that man's amusements 
will ever drive out his spiritual longings; I 
do not believe his spiritual longings will ever 
wholly root out the earthy ones. The mistake 
lies in the assumption that the two are neces- 
sarily inimical. 

When we can succeed in developing a race 
of sane, sound, clean-natured, high-minded 
men and women, their amusements will take 
care of themselves ; but until that millennial 
breed really appears to inherit the earth the 
demand of my buoyant friend for " something 
kind o' innocent and excitin' " to amuse men 
like him is a matter for serious consideration. 

There is a certain sectarian college whose 
fostering church sends every year an envoy 
to inquire into the welfare of the institution, 
and to keep a jealous watch over its interests 
and those of the denomination. One might 
imagine such a messenger inquiring ear- 
nestly: Is this college educating men and 
women in the broadest sense of the word ? 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 219 

Is it qualifying them to become good citizens, 
wise heads of families ? Are they clean, trust- 
worthy, trained to high thoughts ? Have they 
gained spiritual common sense as well as the 
learning of the schools ? Above all, do you 
teach the youth in your charge that most 
significant truth that " loyalty to God means 
liberty for man " ? 

This is what one might erroneously sup- 
pose the scope of such a mission to compre- 
hend. What the messenger really did demand 
to be told on a recent visit was this: Has 

President yet succeeded in stamping 

out dancing? 

Yet if it is easy to be narrow, it is also easy 
to grant too much latitude. He needs must 
be a wise man, and a philosopher into the 
bargain, who knows just when to be wide as 
the universe, and when to stand like a wall. 
In a world made up of wheels within wheels 
and ramifications within ramifications, where 
everything depends on some other thing and 
the other thing depends on everything else, 
the difficulty of maintaining a just balance 
must be acknowledged ; yet in this struggle 



220 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 

for a just balance lies the salvation of the 
earth. 

We live — to sum up the situation — in 
a generation that has gone recreation-mad. 
Outdoor sports and indoor sports fill up our 
leisure moments, or, in some cases, all our 
moments. Athletics, golf, tennis, games of 
all manners and lacking manners rise, flour- 
ish, and decay. The race horse, the bicycle, 
and the automobile pursue one another across 
the stage of action. We play at being intel- 
lectual, we play at being religious, we play at 
being " tough," and all three are merged and 
included in being men and women " of the 
world." 

Our best educated classes, — and we flatter 
ourselves that we have the last word in the 
matter of education, — our wisest classes are 
not necessarily very wise in the matter of 
their recreations ; our half-educated brethren 
and sisters ape the manners of their betters, 
and a degree lower down in the scale the 
struggling masses take what they can get in 
the way of amusement, and take it where 
they can get it. In all classes, high and low, 



AND JUDGMENT TO COME 221 

veneered and unveneered, it is almost univer- 
sally true that the foundations of appetite are 
too often laid in the struggle to " have a good 
time." The instrument of an occasional hilar- 
ity has an unfortunate tendency to develop 
into the minister to a quenchless thirst. 

I am always willing to ask questions which 
I cannot answer, therefore I frankly confess 
that I do not know just how the balance be- 
tween the prayer-meeting and the toboggan 
slide is to be reached ; probably the chasm be- 
tween the two would seem to me much less 
abysmal than to some of my stricter brethren. 
It is a chasm that will never be bridged by 
prohibitions alone, by persuasions alone, by 
sacrifice alone. Since in the last resort every 
thinking creature must work out his own 
salvation with fear and trembling, to harden 
him for the contest, to teach him how to 
grow to the full stature of a man, is the bur- 
den of the human problem. It is a problem 
that will never be solved by demanding un- 
necessary sacrifices, by ignoring vital instincts, 
by allowing prejudice to usurp the functions 
of common sense. 



VIII 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

WHEN book-dusting time comes around, 
it is always rather a heart-searching 
season, because every library which has been 
gradually accumulated by people to whom 
books have a human interest is full of un- 
derlying memories. The last time I attacked 
my bookcases, fired by a periodic recollection 
that cleanliness is next to godliness, it was 
my old schoolgirl copy of " Paley's Evidences 
of Christianity " that opened inadvertently in 
my hand and served to paralyze my energies. 
On one of the blank pages at the begin- 
ning of the book I found a brief written 
dialogue which, like an elixir of youth, in a 
breathing space blotted out all the interven- 
ing years and made me a girl again waiting 
the bell-stroke for morning recitation in the 
sunny classroom of the old seminary among 
the hills. The familiar scene lived again in 
my memory, — the autumn morning, full of 



226 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

color and clear airs, the wide windows open- 
ing on the wonderful circle of hills, and the 
boy from Boston handing me, with his bow 
of unfailing courtesy, the volume, in which 
he had written in that finished, elegant script 
which was so characteristic of him, — 

" I hear you have received promotion on 
the field." 

" For what ? " I wrote in return. 

" From the context one would say it must 
have been for courage under fire." 

I ought, indeed, to have been very down- 
cast on that memorable morning, — it was 
only the joy of nature's pageant and the flood- 
ing spirits of youth, and, perhaps, the natural 
resistance of an india-rubbery temperament, 
that kept me from being so, — for, on the day 
before, I had succeeded, like Satan, in exalt- 
ing myself by merit to an exceeding " bad 
eminence." 

"Once in about so often," as the phrase 
goes, it was the custom at our seminary to 
set in motion the machinery destined to 
culminate later in a season of religious re- 
vival. 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 227 

On the day in question we had found on 
assembling at the hour for chapel that such a 
season was about to be inaugurated. It was 
my first term at the school, and my first ex- 
perience in the peculiar reformatory methods 
employed there. I am constitutionally reluc- 
tant in regard to making hasty promises, and 
constitutionally stubborn where I suspect 
anything like a trap ; hence I remained quies- 
cent while invitations to rise for prayers fol- 
lowed each other in rapid succession, each 
more sweeping than the last ; and when, as a 
climax to the whole, " all those who desire to 
be counted with the righteous at the great 
and awful day of the judgment of God " 
were requested to manifest their aspirations, 
I still sat fast, the only sinner in the assem- 
blage, amidst the horrified glances of the vir- 
tuous and the audible titters of the frivolous- 
minded. 

It would not have suited Dr. , the head 

of the institution, a man of much individual- 
ity of character, to have taken any immedi- 
ate personal notice of my contumacy, but in 
the long prayer which followed I waited with 



228 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

vivid interest for the petition in which I knew 
I should be impaled. It came at the very last. 
In those drawling, sarcastic tones which every 
student knew well, he added, as an after- 
thought, " O Lord, I had almost forgotten to 
beseech thee to have mercy, in spite of her 
stubbornness, on the young woman who has 
expressed a desire to be damned ! " 

Our class in Evidences of Christianity was 
not in all respects a usual one, though the 
average type of pupil was not lacking. I 
knew, on that autumn morning, that the con- 
ventionally pious element — they to whom 
complexities of temperament were unknown 
quantities ■ — would wonder at my temerity in 
daring to face the public eye. I knew, too, 
that there were in the school many well-be- 
haved young men and women who were in 
their hearts rather glad that at last some one 
had mustered sufficient courage, if not to be 
sincere, at least not to be /^sincere. For the 
opinions of the unusual element in our class 
I did not trouble myself ; I knew that in time 
I should hear and be interested in them. 
From the conventional theological student I 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 229 

should be likely to hear also. He was a crea- 
ture instinct with opinions which he unceas- 
ingly disseminated. 

The " big minister," as we called the other 
theologue, whose thoughts were as big as his 
body, was in the class for business purposes, 
but he gave as much as he got. The tall 
young law student was there because he 
loved the big minister, and also loved all dis- 
cussion. The boy who sometimes brought 
snakes in his pocket was there because he 
had a universally inquiring mind. I was there 
because my father desired me to be. He had 
his own notions of what such study might 
do for me. The boy from Boston was there 
because I was. He was my " opposite " at 
table, and to be an opposite at the old Hill 
seminary was to subscribe to a relation as in- 
flexible while it lasted as the marriage vow, 
though it must be acknowledged that the 
youth in question was of a nature to be bound 
only of free will. His inflexibility was that of 
tempered steel. 

He was a merry-hearted scamp, this boy 
from Boston, a creature full of graceful 



230 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

courtesies, full of fascinating contradictions. 
Sentiment and mischief strove within him 
mightily for mastery. He knew Mrs. Brown- 
ing's sonnets by heart, nor did this know- 
ledge prevent him from enjoying much more 
questionable literature. Among so many raw, 
untrained country boys, his graces of person 
and manner shone resplendent, and the other 
girls openly envied me the attentions which 
their less facile squires longed, yet scorned, 
to pay. 

I remember well the night he asked me to 
be his opposite. Standing on the stone steps 
outside the broken alcove window, he seized 
my hand through the shattered pane, and 
bowed over it in such inspired oblivion of 
the circle of admiring girls who stood by in 
open-mouthed enjoyment of these story-book 
doings, that, whatever / might have done, he, 
at least, escaped all suspicion of appearing 
ridiculous. My room-mate, at hair-brushing 
time, spoke with much contumely of her own 
sturdy, red-cheeked opposite, a sterling but 
awkward fellow. 

" I 'd give all Bert's goodness for a little of 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 231 

Louis's grand air," she said, with true femi- 
nine disregard for solid values. 

So full of bounding life was he, this boy 
from Boston, so easily foremost in everything 
requiring athletic vigor, that one found it 
hard to credit his frequent and cheerful state- 
ment that he already bore within his supple 
frame the seeds of an early doom. 

" I think I '11 be pretty much alive while I 
am alive," he used to urge suavely in extenu- 
ation of some unusually flagrant piece of mis- 
chief, "because my chance is going to be 
such a limited one." 

The professor who had charge of our theo- 
logical vagaries was one of the old-fashioned 
variety, a product of the days of slower intel- 
lectual development and more moderate am- 
bitions, when men studied for love of study, 
and to teach was in itself a sort of distinction. 
He was a man of strong individuality, big- 
headed, clear-eyed, of a scrupulous neatness 
in dress which, while totally disregarding 
changes of fashion, achieved by its precision 
a certain degree of elegance. His methods of 
teaching were as individual as his character. 



232 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

On this especial morning the lesson as- 
signed was a part of the chapter on the mor- 
ality of the gospel, and dealt distinctively 
with " the internal evidence of Christianity," 
but Professor D. opened the recitation with 
an abrupt question addressed to the boy from 
Boston, who, elbows on knees, was leaning 
forward with dark eyes seemingly yearning 
toward the hills. 

" If you were going to preach a sermon, 
Mr. R.," — here a ripple of amusement showed 
itself on the circle of listening faces, — " what 
text would you choose ? " 

The boy from Boston, still absorbed in 
the hills, answered with unsmiling prompt- 
ness, — 

" I would select one short sentence from 
the poet Simonides : ' It is hard to be good/ " 

" What do you know about the poet Si- 
monides ? " the professor questioned, still ab- 
ruptly. 

" Nothing at all," acknowledged the pur- 
veyor of unexpected bits of erudition, " ex- 
cept that he was a Greek and apparently 
knew what he was talking about." 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 233 

" The apostle Paul said something to the 
same effect, and Job foreshadowed it when 
he declared, ' Man, that is born of woman, is 
of few days and full of trouble.' " The pro- 
fessor's voice was rich in sonorous tones. He 
enjoyed quoting. "Mr. M.," — turning sud- 
denly to the congressman's son, — " what text 
would you choose to preach from ? " 

The congressman's son, as a member of 
the theology class, was wholly unaccounted 
for. Nobody pretended to know why he was 
there. I doubt if he had any definite reason 
in his own mind. He was an unmothered 
waif, who had already been judiciously weeded 
from seven successive schools. The boy from 
Boston had dubbed him " our gentleman of 
the seven sins," and the name stuck. He was 
at present precariously enjoying his eighth 
and last experiment in school homes. After 
this, — so rumor said, — in case of one more 
dismissal, already perilously near, came the 
deluge. We had all grown rather fond of 
that clever, dark face of his, and shielded and 
bolstered him on all possible occasions, dread- 
ing the final catastrophe of submergence. 



234 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

A slow flush mounted through the olive of 
his cheek as he answered the professor's query. 

" I would preach," he declared, " from the 
text, * It is hard not to be good.'" 

There was a universal stare. Nobody had 
ever suspected our gentleman of the seven 
sins of encountering just this sort of difficulty. 

He grinned a little when he saw our faces. 
" I don't mean just what you think I do. 
What I 'm trying to get at is this, — no fellow 
who 's got any decency in him goes to the 
dogs without having times when he kicks 
himself. Perhaps he goes just the same, — 
most generally I guess he does, — but it don't 
follow that he 's dead in love with what he 's 
doing." 

" If he keeps on long enough," the law 
student commented, " he gets to the place 
where he don't kick himself any more. A 
trained nurse who has spent a large part of his 
time taking care of old men during the last 
days of their lives told me that as a rule in his 
experience his irreligious patients met death 
with more equanimity than the professing 
Christians." 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 235 

The truly-good theologue looked pained at 
the turn the recitation was taking. The big 
minister seemed unusually alert and full of 
interest. Even in those days he was alive to 
every subtlest opportunity for divining the 
souls of men. The professor, noting his in- 
tent look, answered it with a question, — 

" How would you account for the truth of 
such a statement, granting it to be true ? " 

" Easily enough. It merely shows the 
difference between an oversensitive and an 
undersensitive conscience." 

" Miss B.," — it was my turn now for one 
of the professor's darting questions, — " if 
you were going to characterize the ordinary 
method of presenting the subject of religion 
to the unconverted, so-called, what form would 
your comment take ? " 

" I should say," I suggested boldly, " that 
the subject is usually presented wrong end 
foremost." 

The pious theologue groaned audibly. 
Who was I, an acknowledged pagan, that my 
opinions on religious topics should be even 
tolerated? At sight of his displeasure the 



236 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

professor waxed genial. " How so ? " he in- 
quired encouragingly. 

" Why," I hesitated, " of course it is a won- 
derful and beautiful thing to be good, but 
most of the time people get so mixed up with 
* Thou shalt nots ' that they forget the heroic 
side of it. I suppose life is a good deal like 
this school. We 're awfully tempted to break 
rules." 

The good theologue took his life in his 
hands. He had a duty to perform, let the 
professor trample upon him as he might. " Are 
we not wasting time ? " he asked, pensively 
patient. "Were we not to-day to consider 
the morality of the gospel, a great subject?" 

There was a gleam of blue fire under the 
professor's heavy brows. " And what is the 
gospel for, Mr. C, but for the building up of 
man ? We were to study to-day the internal 
evidences of Christianity, — a great subject, 
truly, a strange, subtle subject, the inmost 
significance of which is not written upon the 
surface of life, but to be sought for, earnestly 
and patiently sought out in the hidden re- 
cesses of the heart and soul. No discussion 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 237 

is a waste of time that may chance to open a 
window into the soul of a man or woman. I 
claim that every human creature holds within 
himself greater possibilities for good than he 
himself realizes. I believe, sir, in unconscious 
goodness, intuitive Christianity, and I thank 
God that I do so believe. It is my business 
to recognize, to seek out, to develop, such 
possibilities in my pupils. I find them where 
you, sir, would never dream of looking for 
these evidences, but it is not your fault, sir, 
not your fault so much as your misfortune, 
that you are constitutionally incapacitated for 
viewing any subject in its entirety ! " 

At the close of this same week, the week 
of the foregoing recitation, dawned the longed- 
for day of the annual " fall walk." 

It mattered little to the hot heart of youth 
that, though the autumn sun shone, a chill 
wind rustled the withering scarlet of the trees. 
No one stayed within doors for so slight a 
matter as the blowing of the wind on this 
long-expected day of un trammeled " social- 
izing," when the sexes might mingle in hila- 



238 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

rious and permitted intercourse. When we 
streamed down the long road toward South 
Pond, none was left behind. The good theo- 
logue, suppressed but unsubdued, trudged 
with the rest, and, in his grudging way, made 
holiday in his heart. The big minister swung 
along with mighty stride, followed by the tall 
law student, still discussing, discussing ever- 
more. The snake boy gathered in a scanty 
autumn harvest. The boy from Boston, af- 
flicted with one of his worst bronchial colds, 
croaked buoyantly at my right, although the 
professor in charge, the shepherd of our flock, 
chose persistently to linger in our company. 
It was our only unrestricted day for the 
whole term, yet no one would have supposed 
from the gallant bearing of my facile opposite 
that he found the good professor's presence 
unwelcome. He — the boy from Boston — 
had missionary relatives whom, one would 
judge from his ordinary conversation, he did 
not estimate according to their full excellence. 
Yet, as it seemed to-day, he had nevertheless 
taken in at the pores much picturesque in- 
formation about Burmah. He charmed the 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 239 

attendant professor ; the good theologue un- 
willingly drew near, drawn in spite of himself ; 
the big minister joined our group ; the law 
student, forced to cease arguing, listened to 
the croaking voice that unfailingly seized the 
salient point of each situation. We, the un- 
worthy ones, proceeded on our pondward way 
haloed and girt about by an assemblage of 
the good, and once, only once, did I detect 
an irreverent twinkle in the dark eyes of the 
boy from Boston. 

When we had reached our destination, and 
most of our group were participating in a 
lively scramble for needed firewood, the pro- 
fessor, watching an agile figure always in the 
midst of the fray, commented absentmindedly 
to whomever it might concern : — 

" A fascinating personality — most fasci- 
nating ! Such life, such courage, such buoy- 
ancy in spite of discouragements, such un- 
failing grasp of whatever he touches — but 
complex, most complex! I hardly know 
whether to count him most strongly for good 
— or — or otherwise." 

" Louis ? I count him for good," the candid 



240 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

girl pronounced uncompromisingly. She was 
always ready to answer questions. " He 's the 
fussiest boy in this school about the way girls 
should behave." 

" Yes, yes," the professor mused, still in a 
psychologic mist, " he naturally obscures the 
feminine judgment." 

It was later in the day, after our dinner 
had been served, that things came to a climax. 
Ordinarily my opposite and myself would 
have been wandering far afield with our free- 
footed comrades, but on this special occasion 
that hoarse note in his voice had kept us 
hovering near the fire, though the anxiety 
was mine, not his. 

Our camping-ground had been chosen near 
the outlet, where a strong current swept into 
the turbulent and rocky stream connecting 
two ponds. The orphan, who throve on mis- 
chief, was just now choosing to amuse him- 
self by poling about on a large, floating log. 
To awaken disquiet was the orphan's normal 
air. The fact that he could not swim only 
gave poignancy to his joy. 

The orphan was a red-haired imp of parts. 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 241 

He had no visible means of support, yet man- 
aged to exist because we all stayed him with 
flagons and comforted him with apples. In 
fact, so universally did we maintain one purse 
with him that the only care remaining on his 
mind was that of giving us enough trouble 
for our money. In the midst of admonitions, 
instructions, and objurgations he placidly con- 
tinued to pole, and in the natural excitement 
of watching him prepare to drown, the little 
group left on the shore fell to discussing its 
swimming powers. 

It seemed that our gentleman of the seven 
sins was a good swimmer, but always subject 
to violent cramps except in the mildest of 
summer waters. The boy from Boston loved 
to swim, but was forbidden " because of his 
beastly chest." The snake boy could swim 
six strokes. The candid girl knew how to 
float. The ever-watchful professor used to 
swim a little when he was a youngster. The 
good theologue could swim anywhere, at all 
times and seasons. 

At this point the page of history and nar- 
rative suddenly left a blank for illustration. 



242 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

The pole slipped, the treacherous log rolled 
to leeward, and the orphan, with a wild whoop 
of exultant anguish, disappeared into the 
flood. The boy from Boston was temporarily 
absent on a search for more wood ; the good 
theologue, the expert swimmer, stood rigid 
on the shore as if violently petrified, but the 
congressman's son, he to whom chill waters 
always brought cramps, hesitated not the 
twinkling of an eye. Coat off, his swift plunge 
into the rapid water seemed coincident with 
our next breath. We saw him seize the or- 
phan's red crest just as it came to the surface, 
saw him strike out boldly for the shore ; then, 
while our hearts froze within us, he began to 
waver and struggle, and had it not been for 
the boy from Boston, who, tearing off his 
coat as he ran, plunged in his turn just in 
time to save the situation, those two white 
faces would have gone together sweeping 
down the chill current of death. The last 
comer, whose agile intelligence seemed always 
prepared for emergencies, knew where to turn 
in the search for shallow waters, and it seemed, 
after all, but the space of one long heartbeat 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 243 

before swift help came, feet flying from all 
directions, and the three drenched and gasp- 
ing heroes of the scene were drawn safely on 
dry land and hustled off to the nearest farm- 
house, the orphan gurgling and sputtering in 
a sort of irregular rhythm all the way. 

When the last wild gurgle had faded into 
silence, the candid girl turned to the theo- 
logue, who, waking to life once more, seemed 
to be making tentative experiments in the use 
of his component parts. 

" What was the matter with you about that 
time ? " she inquired, with her usual unflinch- 
ing frankness. 

The theologue looked pale but firm. " I 
remembered," he said stiffly, " that mine was 
a consecrated life." 

" Consecrated fiddlestick ! " the candid girl 
commented with decisive finality. 

Two days after these happenings, when we 
met for our next regular recitation, the class 
in Evidences of Christianity presented its 
full complement of members, and the occa- 
sion would, perhaps, have proved but an or- 



244 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

dinary one, had it not been that the good 
theologue, who was evidently having diffi- 
culty with the somewhat lumbering machi- 
nery which he called a conscience, evinced a 
determination to discuss past issues. 

" I suppose," he said, addressing the pro- 
fessor with an air of patient gravity, " from 
the remarks thrown out by you at our last 
recitation, that you would consider the in- 
tuitive acts of unsanctified persons — such 
acts, for instance, as resulted in the rescue 
of young Blake on Saturday — as constitut- 
ing in themselves internal evidence of the 
existence of what you would tflrm uncon- 
scious Christianity in the minds of the ac- 
tors." 

11 It was not my intention, Mr. C," — the 
professor spoke a little sternly, — " to have 
referred to this matter in the class, although 
personally it would give me nothing but plea- 
sure to do so, because I felt sure that the 
principal participants in that rescue would 
very much prefer to escape public mention, 
but since the subject is forced upon me, I say 
this : Both those young men, by the intuitive 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 245 

acts to which yotir : re-£er, risked their lives 
twice over. The one made ' the plunge with 
the full knowledge that he would probably 
be seized with fatal cramps, the other was in 
a physical condition which rendered such an 
immersion in icy water a deadly peril. I ask 
you whether you would consider that such 
sacrifices of self, sanctified or unsanctified, 
make for ^^righteousness ? " 

Our gentleman of the seven sins interposed 
gruffly, " There was n't any Christianity or 
righteousness about the business. There was 
only one thing to do. - Any fellow would have 
done it." \ " ' 7 t . r v 

" I jumped in for my health," the boy from 
Boston declared in a cheerful croak. " Cold 's 
been better ever since." 

The professor smiled, but his smile was a 
grave one. " When we consider what might 
have been the outcome of the accident, young 
gentlemen, the matter is hardly one for jest- 
ing, and," turning to the good theologue, " if 
any member of this class feels disposed to 
underestimate such intuitive acts as were 
here displayed, I would ask him to call to 



246 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

mind the statement of his Master and mine : 
1 Greater love hath no man than this, that a 
man lay down his life for his friends.' " 

With such utterances as these fresh in our 
minds, we felt it rather a blow when, at the 
close of the recitation hour, we heard the 
professor request our gentleman of the seven 
sins to come to his house that afternoon. 

Owing to his peculiar dignity and the in- 
fluence which he exerted in the school, it 
often became the professor's task to prepare 
victims for the pangs of execution, and we 
knew, alas ! too well we knew, that the con- 
gressman's son had been diligently and felo- 
niously abstracting himself from the " special 
meetings " which were nightly going on. 

All the afternoon, as the manner of such 
critical seasons was, parties of anxious youths 
scouted and reconnoitred in the vicinity of 
the professor's house, and yet the object of 
their solicitude appeared not. Finally, as dusk 
drew on, the snake boy, characteristically 
ready to obtain information at whatever per- 
sonal sacrifice, volunteered to conduct a for- 
lorn hope. " I '11 make an arrant," he said, 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 247 

and having made it, hastened it to its desti- 
nation. 

It was in that bygone epoch when ama- 
teur craftsmen all over the country were busy 
sawing out ornamental shelves and brackets 
and designing hollywood frames. The pro- 
fessor, who possessed a very pretty mechan- 
ical turn, had set up a workshop of his own. 
Hither, seeing a cheerful light, the snake 
boy directed his steps. The door stood a 
trifle ajar, and the seeker after information 
was able to gratify his curiosity without be- 
traying his presence. At one end of the 
bench sat the professor, at the other the con- 
gressman's son, both busily at work. Ever 
and anon there came to the cautious lis- 
tener sounds of amicable conversation, assur- 
ing himself of which fact, he beat a masterly 
retreat. 

" It 's all right, fellers. May as well quit 
watchin\ The professor's jest found a straw- 
berry mark on ole Seven Sins's arm, and 
there ain't any talk of an eighth sin this time." 

After this, it became a regular occurrence 
for the professor and the congressman's son 



248 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 

to carve and jig-saw in company on Saturday 
afternoons, and as a result of this odd copart- 
nership, more than for any other reason, it 
chanced that our gentleman of the seven sins 
never added his crowning offense. 

On book-dusting morning, when I sat with 
the worn volume of Paley's " Evidences " in 
my lap, living over the former days, it was as 
if I had reopened a familiar tale to which the 
years had added a sequel. 

I know that the beloved professor has long 
ago finished his work in the world of the act- 
ual, a world that can ill spare him and his 
like. I know that the snake boy has made his 
inquisitiveness tell in the realm of natural 
history. I know that the candid girl, an ex- 
cellent wife and mother, is also active in good 
work in the community where she lives. I 
know that the tall law student has made 
his mark in a great city, and that the big 
minister has never ceased to enlarge his bor- 
ders. 

What a glorious sermon on immortality 
was that which I heard him preach ! How 



BOOK-DUSTING TIME 249 

wonderfully from the arc of mortal life he 
drew the circle of eternity ! 

The good theologue, too, is preaching still. 
I meet him sometimes, grown rotund, and no 
less self-satisfied than of old. It was our gen- 
tleman of the seven sins who, several years 
ago, was elected reform mayor of his city. If 
one may believe the current newspapers of 
the time, he " made good." That turning-lathe 
of the professor's proved the turning point of 
a life. 

The boy from Boston also made good. He 
went as buoyantly and light-heartedly to the 
grave as if death were but a bubble on a 
foaming cup. It was on a May night that he 
slipped away into infinity, — there is a story 
about that, too, — and when I think of the 
mound in Mount Auburn which I have never 
seen, I always fancy that the happiest May- 
time breezes are playing there. 

How the stars shone that night to light 
him on his way ! and he " greeted the unseen 
with a cheer." 



IX 
EDUCATION 



EDUCATION 



ONCE before, many years ago, I sat down 
at my desk and wrote the caption " Ed- 
ucation " large at the head of my page. I was 
then sixteen years old and I should probably 
have called that humble sheet of paper my 
" virgin page " had I found it necessary to 
give it a local habitation and a name. 

The master spirit who was at that time 
directing the trials and experiences of the 
Hallowell high school had the kindly habit 
of furnishing as a gift the subjects for our 
fortnightly " compositions ; " delightfully easy, 
obvious subjects such as " The Pleasures of 
Memory," " The Advantages of History," and 
kindred topics suited to the capacity of youth- 
ful minds. At sixteen, one naturally knows a 
good deal about the pleasures of memory ; the 
advantages of history unfold themselves to 



254 EDUCATION 

the most casual observer, and Education — 
with a large E — has already begun to rasp 
itself in indelible lines upon the tender imagi- 
nation. 

I am pleased to know, by reference to the 
battered old " composition book " which lies 
open before me, that even at that period of 
soaring ambition, that halcyon period when 
I " woke in the morning with an appetite 
that could eat the solar system like a cake," 
there was something about the all-pervading 
and all-comprehending nature of this latter 
topic which made me hesitate. 

" Education is a boundless subject," thus 
the theme opens, " and, so wide is the field 
which spreads itself before me, that I hardly 
know where to begin." Once started, how- 
ever, all obstacles were triumphantly swept 
away and the whole question brought to such 
a triumphant conclusion that I have never, 
until this fateful morning, felt it necessary to 
tackle it again. Alas, I know beforehand just 
how lamely, illogically, and inconsistently I 
am going to conduct this second excursion 
into that spreading field ! 



EDUCATION 255 

My past reticence, fortunately, has not been 
shared by other writers, better qualified to 
pursue the problems of education into their 
fastnesses than I can ever hope to be, and I 
have read their pregnant and instructive 
pages with deep and ever-growing interest. 
The meaning of the word, the methods of 
interpreting that meaning, who shall be edu- 
cated, when, where, how, and why it shall be 
done, the question of discrimination between 
sexes, between classes, between tweedledum 
and tweedledee, all these, variously and elo- 
quently and interminably set forth, have 
passed in an endless phantasmagoria before 
my mental vision only to leave my stubborn 
mind set like a rock on one conclusion : The 
wisdom of educating every living creature, 
man, woman, child, fish, flesh, fowl, to the 
limit of individual capacity; and to this con- 
clusion I should add the conviction that there 
is no danger whatever that any creature will 
ever know — really and absolutely know — 
too much. 

It is true that I have not yet removed the 
beam from my own eye, but I am still able 



256 EDUCATION 

to discover the mote which obscures my 
brother's vision. I realize — or I dimly dream 
that I realize — the deficiencies of my own 
education, but much more plainly I perceive 
that my cook would be benefited by a know- 
ledge of the higher mathematics, classical 
literature, and the philosophy of history. It 
may be argued that if she possessed these 
acquirements my kitchen would not contain 
her, but, even if the scheme of universal edu- 
cation were carried out, there must still be 
cooks, and what sane, sanitary, hygienic, aes- 
thetic, reasoning and reasonable possibilities 
might be looked for from a race of enlight- 
ened queens of the kitchen — central suns, 
around which the whole domestic system 
must revolve. 

The typical cook of the average New Eng- 
land town lives, moves, and has her being 
entrenched behind one axiom of precedent : 
the thing which, in her experience, has been 
done, can be done again. After this, the 
deluge. 

It may be, for instance, that the domestic 
goddess in question served her first appren- 



EDUCATION 257 

ticeship in a family of ten. For the consump- 
tion of such a family she was in the daily 
habit of preparing twenty potatoes in one or 
another form. When, during her subsequent 
peregrinations, she condescends to minister 
to my modest home circle of three persons, 
I sometimes assure myself that if to a know- 
ledge of elementary arithmetic she could add 
a thorough understanding of higher algebra, 
geometry, and trigonometry, and then super- 
add some slight acquaintance with differential 
and integral calculus, she might in time be 
able to discover that if ten persons require 
twenty potatoes, by the same ratio of allot- 
ment three persons might be satisfied with 
six. 

In the present fragmentary state of domestic 
education, however, the situation is a hopeless 
one. It is in vain that I present myself peri- 
odically before the dispenser of vegetables to 
suggest that but three consumers of potatoes 
sit at our festal board, that no one of the three 
is afflicted with an inordinate appetite for 
that starch-laden esculent, that a wise econ- 
omy prohibits waste. Arithmetic and politi- 



258 EDUCATION 

cal economy are alike thrown away upon one 
who has but a single formula, unchangeable 
as the decrees of the Medes and Persians, by 
which to regulate the conduct of life. 

I suggest six potatoes, a modest and satis- 
fying half dozen. The arbiter of fate replies, 
" You see, ma'am, I ve always been accus- 
tomed to cookin' twenty " — and twenty it is ! 

Hence it comes that there have been few 
periods during my housekeeping career when 
I have not been provided with a sufficient 
number of cold potatoes to answer any sud- 
den demand upon hospitality. No friend 
ever needed to pass potatoless from my door. 

Yet if it fell to my lot to prepare a civil 
service examination for aspiring domestics 
there is only one point on which I should 
insist. I would not require any candidate to 
know beyond a peradventure why Bedred- 
dan Hassan did or did not put pepper in his 
cream tarts, but on him whose comprehend- 
ing soul could grasp the idea that the prob- 
lem of satisfactorily adding pepper to cream 
tarts need not be an insoluble one, I would 
without hesitation confer a degree. 



EDUCATION 259 

Pepper tarts do not appeal to me, but the 
instinctive realization that to genius all things 
are possible does appeal. It opens flowery 
visions of a domestic possessing no fixed 
standards on the subject of potatoes, an " ex- 
pedientful " person to whom the mixing of a 
cake with three eggs when the recipe calls for 
four would not present insurmountable diffi- 
culties. 

It is true that no amount of education will 
cause wings to sprout on those who are born 
absolutely wingless, but the most unpro- 
mising grub may conceal within its ugly 
breast the possibility of transformation, and 
surely no harm can result from seeking every- 
where the hidden spark of divinity. Imagi- 
nation helps to season the soup and decorate 
the salad, and one may weave the banquets 
of Lucullus, Nero's roses dropping from the 
ceiling, the magic pitcher from which Baucis 
and Philemon drew their never-failing fount, 
John the Baptist's locusts and wild honey, 
Charles Lamb's roast pig, the red wine which 
Omar's nightingale cries unto the rose, and 
that draught of clear water from the well of 



2 6o EDUCATION 

Beth-lehem for which David thirsted, into 
a background that expands the narrowest 
kitchen wall into a vista of memory and 
romance. 

II 

We have become so accustomed to shout- 
ing at the top of our lungs the assertion that 
this is an age of progress that most of us 
have come to an unquestioning belief in the 
reality of what we announce. It is, indeed, 
true that there never were so many schools, 
so many colleges, so many facilities for doing 
special work, such opportunities for learning 
made easy as exist in our day ; but the test of 
what any system of education is doing for its 
age lies rather in what it has accomplished 
for the mass than for the individual. 

If the progress of the last century has 
given us better domestic service, better me- 
chanics, better teachers, more thorough and 
practical scholars, better and wiser all-round 
men and women than those who played their 
part in former generations, if the trend of the 
race has been genuinely upward, then it must 



EDUCATION 261 

be acknowledged that we can with clear con- 
sciences continue to vociferate our claims to 
advancement. 

I hope I am neither a pessimist nor a cynic 
in regard to the achievements of latter-day 
civilization ; I am ready, as a rule, to hurrah 
for my own side, but I am not prepared to 
profess an unqualified surety that the progress 
of the last century has been wholly in the 
right direction. 

In this matter of domestic service, for ex- 
ample, it would not be a difficult business to 
collect a sheaf of testimonies from house- 
keepers who are able to remember the 
changes of the last fifty years, certifying that 
the thrifty, capable, and reliable " hired girl," 
with whose virtues and usefulness so many 
New England households have in former 
days been happily familiar, no longer exists 
except in infrequent and sporadic instances. 

The younger class of girls who, under the 
old regime, went out to service, now employ 
themselves in the shops, factories, and similar 
establishments where their time, after working 
hours, is their own. Like Yankee Doodle 



262 EDUCATION 

they have " put feathers in their caps " and to 
this adornment have added whatever stands, 
in the vogue of the day, for the " rings on 
their fingers and bells on their toes " of 
Mother Goose memory. They know the 
sweets of independence and the proud, if 
imaginary, satisfaction of being " just as good 
as anybody." The domestic ranks in the New 
England towns of to-day are largely recruited 
from a wandering tribe of more mature wo- 
men who vary the serial of matrimony by 
divergences into the field of " working out." 
Some of them belong to the variety known 
as " grass widows," some of them have either 
just " got a bill " or are just about to get a 
bill from their husbands, some have hus- 
bands who appear spasmodically and then 
pass once more into obscuration. During the 
intervals of these interrupted romances the 
heroines of them bestow a somewhat inter- 
mittent and perfunctory attention on house- 
holds whose need is so urgent that the 
members therefore are willing to suffer and 
be strong. 

" I don't need to work out," one of these 



EDUCATION 263 

culinary heroines was wont to murmur pen- 
sively; "ever since I parted from William 
there 's been plenty o' men willin' to marry 
me any mornin' before breakfast," — and this 
statement represents the strongest kind of 
willingness, since many a man who could 
easily be beguiled into wedding after supper 
would in the clearness of morning judgment 
hesitate about delivering himself over to the 
chains of Hymen ! 

The old-fashioned semi-patriarchal system 
which permitted the " help " to become an 
integral part of the family, presents many ob- 
jectional features, yet the natural and logical 
result of such relations between employer 
and employed was to secure a better and 
more intelligent class of service. 

There was a certain neat, spare, gauntly 
decorous, middle-aged woman who, during my 
girlhood, always spent a part of each year 
" helping out " in our crowded household, 
whose memory retains for me an abiding fas- 
cination. She exemplified a type which had 
in those days many representatives, a type of 
woman strong both in mind and body, with 



264 EDUCATION 

an untutored intelligence born of necessity 
and experience. These women were apt to 
be sharp-cornered, full of individuality, inci- 
sive of speech and act, — a surface ungracious- 
ness which did not long conceal a repressed 
sweetness of nature, often the outgrowth of 
deep and conscientious religious feeling. It 
was always a gala day to me when " Aunt 
Sophia" came to abide with us. It meant 
that there would be things doing, fresh 
interests added to life, interests more or less 
piquantly flavored with the new-comer's in- 
dividuality. Aunt Sophia's sharp sayings, 
her idiomatic stories gathered from experi- 
ences in many households, the very unex- 
pectedness of her standpoints, all helped to 
flavor the commonplaceness of daily living ; 
and though I have spoken of her and her 
class as creatures of untutored intelligence, 
in comparison with many of the flippant and 
shallow beings who inhabit our kitchens 
to-day these old-fashioned domestics were 
admirably educated. Sophia drew her intel- 
lectual sustenance from a fount of classical 
English, pure and richly varied literature, 



EDUCATION 265 

and deep spiritual information. She read 
her Bible as eagerly as her prototype of to- 
day reads Bertha M. Clay's novels, and from 
it she gained the knowledge of those mys- 
teries which God has hidden " from ages and 
generations," but makes manifest unto his 
saints. 

It often seems to me that the world of my 
girlhood was a simpler, more dignified, more 
genuine world than that to which our age of 
progress has advanced us to-day. It was a 
striving world then as now, a faulty, narrow- 
minded world, yet many of its common people 
were less radically common than the same 
class of the present generation, simply because 
they were more diligent students of the Bible, 
because they built and founded themselves 
more broadly on the influences and inspira- 
tions of that wonderful classic. 

It may be that in my recollections I some- 
what idealize the virtues of that former gen- 
eration, but I do not idealize the simple 
homes which made no pretense of being 
what they were not, the homes where a nar- 
row income was not a thing to be ashamed 



266 EDUCATION 

of, where thrift and economy were held as 
praiseworthy virtues, where a good many 
daily joys were somehow compatible with a 
rather strenuous notion that life was duty. 

I have said, and I repeat, that I would be 
willing to educate every human and inhuman 
creature up the limit of what is to be known ; 
but if a man cannot know all about Confucius 
and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Darwin, 
the Zend Avesta and the Nibelungenlied, if 
his literary and ethical study is to be limited 
to the assimilation of the contents of one 
volume, I would place in his hands that one 
which in Scotland used piously to be referred 
to as " the Book " and feel that, after all, I 
had given him material for a liberal education. 
He might search its pages for the building 
up of creeds, for the confirmation of prejudice, 
for the foundation of dogma ; but if he contin- 
ued to search with any right-minded desire to 
discover the truth of things, in spite of creeds, 
in spite of prejudices, in spite of dogmas, 
he would find himself broadening and sweet- 
ening, and breathing the air of purer hori- 
zons. 



EDUCATION 267 

It is rather the fashion nowadays to pride 
one's self on knowing little about the Bible, 
just as it is the fashion for men to shake their 
heads with dissimulated pride while they 
aver that they do not profess to be religious. 
Many people seem to feel that to disclaim all 
pretensions to the knowledge of any but the 
material side of life, serves in some mysteri- 
ous fashion to rid them of moral responsi- 
bility. There are some men who apparently 
have the idea that to mention the name of 
God, except by way of oath or adjuration, is 
an uncalled-for exhibition of pious priggish- 
ness; yet the most untutored pagan, how- 
ever primitive his creed may be, who is so far 
from being ashamed of his religion that he 
would rather be ashamed of not possessing 
one, has a deeper hold on the foundation 
structure of all education than such men as 
these. He at least recognizes something 
which binds him morally, however mistaken 
his conception of morals may be, and the 
recognition of moral boundaries is the cor- 
ner stone of the highest civilization. 



268 EDUCATION 



III 



A group of bright young fellows discussed 
in my presence not long ago the accepted 
standpoint, according to twentieth-century 
ideals, from which a man should pursue his 
chosen profession. From this conversation 
it appeared that the aim in view was to secure 
the largest possible income in the shortest 
possible time. 

Talent, application, strenuous work, all had 
their value in the struggle, as enabling the 
aspirant more speedily to obtain recognition 
in an up-to-date generation which gives prizes 
only to the concrete. 

As I listened I learned that a political ca- 
reer is a mistake because, unless a man gets 
hold of, and is willing to profit by, a graft of 
some description, his honors bring him more 
outlay than income. The judge's bench is 
tabooed for the truly ambitious because of the 
straitened salary which restricts its emolu- 
ment. To accept a position, however flatter- 
ing, in any branch of the teaching profession, 
is to limit one's chances for making money. 



EDUCATION 269 

To enter the ministry is an absurd propo- 
sition for a man who is capable of gaining a 
competency in any other profession, since 
the best-paid clergyman cannot, according to 
modern standards of wealth, hope to become 
a rich man. 

I confess that it surprised me to find these 
clean, well-balanced, carefully trained youths 
turning their backs so doughtily on the re- 
cord of past values as estimated by what the 
ages have found vital enough to preserve, to 
seek the choicest rewards of life in things 
that perish with the using. They were young, 
these prematurely wise boys ; I doubt if any 
one of their number wholly meant what he 
said, and some of them, I am very sure, cher- 
ish in their hearts higher ideals than their 
careless speech revealed. The significance 
of their talk lies in its expression of the spirit 
of the age, a spirit which one finds only too 
frequently embodied in both the speech and 
act of older and riper men who have, it would 
seem, lived long enough and deeply enough 
to know something about what life can take 
away as well as what it can give. 



270 EDUCATION 

Religion and patriotism and good sense 
and good government and final profit are all 
against this sort of thinking which makes 
only for ultimate rottenness. A cloud of 
witnesses, giants of the past, who have known 
alike the life of soul and sense, protest against 
it. As an expression of the spirit of a cen- 
tury which claims to have opened the doors 
of enlightenment to rich and poor alike, such 
standards are utterly trivial and uneducated. 

I found last year in an old chest, which 
had been long hidden away in my father's 
attic, a bundle of letters written to a young 
man who entered upon student life in Bow- 
doin College about the year 1830. The young 
scholar was evidently an open-hearted and 
versatile-minded fellow, of a temperament 
which opened to him a large circle of friends. 
These friends all wrote letters, and as they 
lived in a day when transportation was diffi- 
cult and postage high, their epistles were gen- 
erally lengthy ones. Although the student 
himself was a struggling youth whose college 
career was prolonged by the necessity of 
earning money to pay his expenses, he repre- 



EDUCATION 271 

sented a prominent family, well known and 
much respected throughout the county which 
is now thickly sown with descendants from its 
various branches. 

I know from household tradition some- 
thing about the circle of young friends whose 
faded letters made up the treasure-trove of 
the old chest. They, too, were scions of emi- 
nently worthy families in a day when hard 
work and struggle were regarded as a neces- 
sary and to-be-expected portion of everyday 
life, and when it was no disgrace to acknow- 
ledge an habitual scarcity of available cash. 

The Bowdoin student was the only college 
man in his circle, much envied and much 
felicitated for his position and opportunities. 
It was universally expected that he would, as 
a result of much learning, rise to a lofty rank 
in life; but when his companions set before 
him examples for his emulation they most 
frequently selected the triumphs of Webster 
and Clay, or suggested the name of some 
eminent divine. To urge him on in mere 
money-making was far from their thoughts. 

The young men whose letters were thus 



272 EDUCATION 

preserved represented varying occupations. 
One, according to his own definition, was " a 
wielder of the yardstick," two were post- 
office clerks, several were teachers of country 
schools, one a farmer lad who during the 
winter helped his father to manufacture shin- 
gles. The young women also taught school, 
did sewing, or even, in emergency, assisted 
in housework. 

After the fashion of their century the 
young creatures poured forth their sentiments, 
their reflections, their aspirations, without 
stint. They described sunsets and moon- 
rises ; they philosophized regarding every- 
thing that pertained to life ; they referred 
darkly to hidden griefs ; quoted from Byron, 
Moore, and kindred poets ; analyzed the pas- 
sion of love from depths of profound experi- 
ence ; gave synopses of sermons and political 
addresses ; and by and by, when these mighty 
topics had been exhausted, devoted a page or 
two to local gossip and the discussion of 
social functions. It was a humble epistle in- 
deed that did not glitter with classical allu- 
sions. But through all their commonplaces 



EDUCATION 273 

and crudenesses, these letters revealed in 
strong light the standpoint of aspiration held 
by the youth of that period, a standpoint 
based on the conviction that knowledge is 
power. 

In the evenings, in the odd moments be- 
tween other avocations, they were all taking 
courses of study. The young man of the 
yardstick was translating Cicero and Sallust 
and studying astronomy ; the post-office clerks 
were writing lyceum lectures on abstruse 
topics ; one of the teaching young men was 
studying moral philosophy and different sys- 
tems of theology, " not with any idea of en- 
tering the ministry, but because he had a 
natural bent for such pursuits ; " the farmer 
lad was dividing his leisure between church- 
going, village festivities, " back-lot dances." 
and reading the English poets and essayists 
during otherwise unoccupied winter even- 
ings. 

He tells his correspondent that " making 
shingles in the sunny corner of the old work- 
shop is an occupation that lends itself readily 
to the weaving of many dreams," and as one 



274 EDUCATION 

reads the faded sentences one feels how the 
tides and the yearnings of youth flooded that 
sunny workshop corner. I remember this 
writer, the intimate picture of whose daily 
life is an especially graphic one, as a tall old 
man of stern face and erect military bearing. 
As a child I often visited in his home, but I 
never dreamed of him as capable of such a 
record of ardent young manhood as his letters 
reveal. 

The girls were studying too; going to 
school at the " Academy " between periods 
of teaching ; " keeping up their Latin " while 
the teaching was going on. The sewing girl 
" went on with French whenever she could 
borrow a dictionary " and rejoiced greatly at 
unexpectedly securing several odd volumes 
of Shakespeare. 

In the same paper-covered chest I found 
also the records of The Franklin Debat- 
ing Society, formed in 1822 by the printer's 
boys of a New England town. The member- 
ship of this society was later augmented by 
the addition of a number of clerks and me- 
chanics. 



EDUCATION 275 

One of the debaters, who shared in the 
benefits of this club, says of it in relating the 
story of his life : — 

" We got leave to occupy the second story 
of the Old South schoolhouse. We furnished 
our own wood and lights. We wrote compo- 
sitions, we declaimed, debated questions of 
importance and enacted dialogues. Our com- 
positions were corrected by an educated man. 
This society, with a succession of members, 
continued for four or five years, meeting once 
a week. With two or three exceptions all of 
us have closed our earthly career, but if none 
of us ever rose to be great men, not one be- 
came vicious or dissipated." 

The society records, kept in an eminently 
neat and businesslike manner, give account 
of one hundred and eighteen meetings, with 
debates, addresses, essays, and reports of 
committees on all sorts of topics, civil, reli- 
gious, literary, etc. 

I copy a few of the questions for discussion 
to show what these youths, hardly past the 
age of boyhood, were voluntarily thinking and 
talking about : — 



276 EDUCATION 

What are the advantages of a free republic 
over a hereditary kingdom ? 

Should deistical and atheistical writings be 
prohibited by law ? Answer : No. 

Should imprisonment for debt be abol- 
ished ? Answer : No. 

Which is most essential in the representa- 
tive of a free people, integrity or talents? 
Discussion continued during two meetings ; 
final answer : Integrity. 

Can any measure be taken to rid America 
of slaves ? Majority vote : Yes. 

It is interesting to note that the reply to 
the question : In what capacity is a woman 
useful ? was indefinitely postponed, also that 
the votes were divided about evenly in answer- 
ing the inquiry : Should the sexes receive 
education in common ? 

The eleventh chapter of the first book of 
Chronicles is one which I often read because 
of its epic flavor. It is, indeed, an epic and a 
lyric in one, this story of David's " mighty 
men." Thirty of them there were, all cap- 
tains, all doers of deeds ; but twenty-seven of 
these heroes, although they had honorable 



EDUCATION 277 

mention among the thirty, "attained not to 
the first three." 

Some of these second-rank men were rather 
capable fellows — Abishai the brother of Joab, 
for instance, who lifted up his spear against 
three hundred and slew them ; Benaiah the 
son of Jehoiada, too, who slew two lionlike 
men of Moab : also he went down and slew 
a lion in a pit in a snowy day. 

" And he slew an Egyptian, a man of great 
stature, five cubits high; and in the Egyp- 
tian's hand was a spear like a weaver's beam." 

Benaiah and Abishai were evidently men 
of aspirations, and so also were those "valiant 
men of the armies " whose names follow in 
the list. If their deeds differed from those of 
the " three mighties " it was rather in kind 
than in degree of prowess. 

We have vaunted a " Big Four " in the 
history of our own country and their deeds 
differed from those of David's First Three in 
kind and degree also. For this was the story 
of the three mighty captains : — 

" Now three of the thirty captains went 
down to the rock to David, into the cave of 



278 EDUCATION 

Adullam; and the host of the Philistines 
encamped in the valley of Rephaim. 

" And David was then in the hold, and the 
Philistines' garrison was then at Beth-lehem. 

" And David longed, and said, Oh that one 
would give me drink of the water of the well 
of Beth-lehem, that is at the gate ! 

" And the three brake through the host 
of the Philistines, and drew water out of the 
well of Beth-lehem, that was by the gate, and 
brought it to David : but David would not 
drink of it, but poured it out to the Lord, 

" And said, My God forbid it me, that I 
should do this thing : shall I drink the blood 
of these men that have put their lives in 
jeopardy? for with the jeopardy of their 
lives they brought it. Therefore he would 
not drink it. These things did these three 
mightiest." 

According to latter-day standards this epi- 
sode was very foolishly managed. David was 
a king, and a rich man. He had flocks and 
herds, gold, silver, and jewels. He was per- 
fectly well able to pay the three captains 
" big money " for risking their lives to gratify 



EDUCATION 279 

his longings, and if, knowing the peril, they 
still chose to jeopardize themselves, that was 
their own affair. When the adventure was 
safely ended, the three captains could perhaps 
have retired on their earnings and purchased 
for themselves purple and fine linen and 
horses and chariots and the like, just as we 
moderns buy changes of raiment and auto- 
mobiles and steam yachts with the blood 
money for which we put ourselves in jeopardy. 

As for David, he could have enjoyed his 
cooling draught with a clear conscience. 
Why not, since he had made a business con- 
tract and " delivered the goods " ? There was 
doubtless water to be had nearer at hand than 
that of the well of Beth-lehem, but if a man 
has an especial kind of thirst, he does have 
it; and having paid for its gratification, to 
waste the liquor is senseless deprivation. 

It was the Puritan conscience, we are told, 
which " put rock foundations under this re- 
public ; " in the minds of some old-fashioned 
people the belief still obtains that courage 
and loyalty and self-control and self-sacrifice 
lie at the foundation of both national and 



2 8o EDUCATION 

individual character, and that the nation or 
the individual who forsakes these ideals will, 
in spite of all the opportunities and training of 
schools and colleges and universities, remain 
radically uneducated. 



EUctrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton &* Co. 
Cambridge, Most., U.S. A. 



AUG 24 1905 



